Cook County says employees and pensioners can breathe a little easier with long-awaited fixes
, the Illinois Supreme Court issued its landmark decision declaring pension benefits were a contractual agreement that could not be “diminished or impaired.”
Between 2016 and 2022, the county has stayed true to its promise, making $2.3 billion in supplemental payments to the fund, pledging another $292 million this year, and setting aside tens of millions more for a pension reserve in case of an economic downturn.Creating that reserve was “a good move,” Wetmore said, and will help the county withstand a potential drop in sales tax revenues or investment returns in times of recession.
But those payments technically “usurped” state law, Martwick said. The existing statute only allowed the county to use property tax revenues to make pension payments. Each year, Preckwinkle and the Cook County Pension Fund would sign an intergovernmental agreement to authorize the sales tax transfer.
Preckwinkle tried and failed multiple times — in 2016, 2019 and 2022 — to codify those changes in the General Assembly. But her proposals included provisions to change the pension fund board’s governance structure to provide more seats to representatives of the county, giving Preckwinkle additional appointees.
“It wasn’t real hard to compromise, because she was still memorializing the most important part: adequate funding,” Martwick said. “Those things, governance, health care got stripped away from this bill. I believe she’s going to continue to work on that in another way.” “A layered amortization is like a payment plan for something where total costs keeps changing,” county finance spokesman Ted Nelson said in an email. “The first year, you set up a payment plan based on the original cost, but then the next year the cost changes. So instead of setting up a brand-new payment plan you set up a payment plan for just the change in cost and layer that on top of the original payment plan.
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