Governor Rick Snyder is going after Michigan’s mountain of unfunded retiree liabilities. He created a task force to look into – quote – “responsible retirement reform”
Last year, Republicans lawmakers tried and failed to overhaul public employee pensions and retirement health benefits. They said it was an effort to fix Michigan’s unfunded liability problem.
Now this task force will come up with a list of pension and health care reforms by this spring.
Democratic Representative Andy Schor is on the task force. He says they want to make sure they don’t hurt employees who have relied on – and in some cases paid for – their pensions.
“You know it’s not an immediate issue. It’s not something where next year someone’s going bankrupt. But, you want to try and solve this problem over the long term. We want to make sure that we can pay off our debts.”
The task force is made up of finance, management and investment experts as well as lawmakers.