46th District State Senate Candidates: Pension Reform
By: Matthew Fuchs
Updated: October 4, 2012
In the race for the 46th District State Senate seat, Democrat incumbent Dave Koehler is facing Republican Pat Sullivan.
Our question: what
will it take to pass pension reform in Illinois?
Pat Sullivan:
We're going to take everyone at the table,
instead of just four leaders. We need to get everyone at the table and talk
pension reform. But we've got to take care of the people that we've made
promises to, also. They've earned a lot of their pension and we can't take that
away from them.
But we need to take everyone we can at the
table on this. This is going to be hard to do and we need to have everybody
present, not just four people from Chicago.
Dave Koehler:
Well number one, I think it takes having
everyone at the table. The one thing that's bothered me about all the
discussions and all the meetings that have taken place so far about pension
reform is that we don't have the judges there. And people wondered why. Why do
we exclude the folks that are getting the highest pension in the state?
Everybody ought to be at the table and we ought to negotiate this so that it's
fair and so that it does the job that we want it to do and that is to make a
sustainable system.
There are lots of models out there we could
use different examples for. Rhode Island is probably the lead state in pension
reform. I'm not saying to just take the Rhode Island plan and mirror it in
Illinois, but I am saying that there are some concepts that we ought to look
at. They've taken a pension system that was in trouble as much as ours and they
negotiated both a defined benefit and a defined contribution plan to work in
conjunction with one another.
Those are some things we ought to look at.
But we've got to do meaningful pension reform and we've got to do it now.
