The in box. Skokie Review (Sun-Times) on S.O.R.E. action at Biss’ office.

The Skokie Review:

SKOKIE — The retired teachers say they had a deal about their pensions and now state legislators like Sen. Daniel Biss, D-9, are trying to break it.

“It’s like Obamacare and what the Tea Partiers tried to do,” said retired Park Ridge teacher Fred Klonsky, who is leading a new group called S.O.R.E. — Skokie Organization of Retired Teachers — to try to protect their pensions. “It was settled. You can’t come back and say let’s do Obamacare over again.”

But Biss sees little way out of a massive pension debt problem for the state unless everyone gives.

“Most far-reaching pieces of pension legislation that I have supported,” Biss said, “are ones that would decrease the unfunded liabilities by virtue of benefit reforms by less than a third.”

In other words, $30 billion or so of the approximately $100 billion of pension debt would come in changes to benefits to decrease the liability.

“When you say changes in the benefits, you mean decreasing the benefits,” Klonsky shot back. “It means those who receive benefits now would receive less benefits if your plan would go into effect.”

The feisty exchange occurred Friday outside the senator’s Skokie office where 50 or so retired and a few current teachers picketed.

They held up signs as they faced busy Dempster Street — “Don’t mess with our TRS,” “If you can read this, thank a teacher,” “We paid you promised” and “Don’t steal our pension” — among them.

Biss was patient and listened, and the teachers were respectful during the exchange. But they pulled no punches in letting the senator know that they were unhappy with the proposals he has supported.

While pensions were the main topic of the day, teachers also asserted that proposed changes in health care and Medicare are evidence that they are under attack.

“I feel it should be the principle of my party to speak for middle class and working people to maintain those benefits, and I really would like to have your cooperation on that,” retired Wheeling-Buffalo Grove teacher and current Skokie resident Harriet Sheeley told Biss.

Agree on the problem

The two sides agree that the state was woefully negligent in not making mandated actuarial payments into the pension system for decades. It created one of the worst pension crises in the country.

“What everyone agrees about is that we have a very, very massive pension debt,” Biss said. “I think what is empirically true is that there is a gap between the assets available in the pension system today and the agreement that has been made to people who have already carried out service. And that is a very, very expensive problem.”

The differences come in how to solve the crisis.

Biss believes reform proposals he supports take “a balanced approach” and spread out the burden among all parties. Less than one-third of the debt would come from workers, he repeated, the rest from the state through new revenue and other means.

“Instead of using the rhetoric about how proposed pension reforms are placing the entire burden on the back of the workers, instead say it will place a little less than a third of the burden on the back of the workers,” Biss said. “I think that would be a better characterization.”

Not to the teachers who assert they already kept their end of the bargain and paid their share. Their pensions, they say, are protected under the state Constitution.

Teachers contribute 9.4 percent of their salary to their pension fund and receive no social security, according to S.O.R.E. It wasn’t teachers who failed to pay into the system and create the crisis, the group maintains.

“This should not be the office we’re marching in front of,” Klonsky said. “The fact that we should be marching in front of the offices of Democrats to defend our pensions is crazy.”

But the debt has become so large, Biss insisted, that there is no viable solution other than sharing the pain.

S.O.R.E. supports a more graduated, progressive income tax to raise revenue in Illinois.

“Penny Pritzker who (owned) the Hyatt Hotel pays the same income tax rate as the people who clean the rooms in the hotel,” Klonsky said. “We’re not proposing higher taxes, but what we’re proposing is those who have more should pay more and those who have less would be paying less.”

What is uncertain is how much additional revenue would be generated under this change as well as closing corporate tax loopholes that S.O.R.E. also recommends.

What is more certain is that S.O.R.E. is not going away. The impassioned group was planning to head to Springfield this week to stand up for protecting pensions they say teachers were promised.

“I turned 20 years old in 1968,” Klonsky said. “Those who turned 20 in 1968 are turning 65 this year. They’re entering Medicare and social security. We bring with us a 60s sensibility. We fight for what is ours. We know how to fight and win.”