While you were Strategic Planning...

Just because you ignore it, doesn't make it go away:

Actuaries at the California Public Employees’ Retirement System say the pension plan needs a rate hike to account for the fact that retirees are living longer. The pension plan’s board will take up a proposal to increase the annual payments from public employers at next month’s meeting. The new longevity calculations would not kick in until 2016-17, and phase in over five years. The revised formula would eventually require cities and counties to pay as much as an additional 9.3 percent of payroll each year, depending on the level of perks. That amount would be in addition to the 24 to 41 percent of payroll a typical local government would already be paying at that point.

Such increases have huge fiscal consequences for local governments. Sacramento’s city finance director told the pension system’s board last month that the proposed longevity rate hike would cost the city an estimated $12.2 million annually by the end of the phase-in period — the equivalent of 102 full-time positions. Riverside estimates that its annual pension costs, about $52 million this year, will increase by as much as $30 million under the rate hike the pension plan approved last year. A higher cost for longer-lived retirees will only add to that mounting expense.