New York City and New Jersey have more than one pension plan for public employees. There are separate plans for teachers and related workers, for police officers and firefighters, and big plans for just about everyone else. My prior post in this series, which this post will assume the reader has read, was about the New York City, New York State, and New Jersey teacher pension plans, with the New York State plan covering teachers in the part of the state outside New York City. This post is about the big plans for most public workers: the New York City Employees Retirement System (NYCERS), which also covers New York City transit workers, the New York (state) Public Employees Pension and Retirement System, which also covers local government workers (including police officers and firefighters) in the rest of New York State, and the New Jersey Public Employees Retirement System.
I thought this post would be written very quickly, because the trends and situation would be the same as it was for the teachers. But when I put data from the database of long term Census Bureau data into the same charts that I used for the teacher pension plans, I found that wasn’t the case for New York City. The various retroactive pension increases and incentives over the years had less of an effect on inflation-adjusted NYCERS benefit payments than they did on benefit payments by the Teachers Retirement System of New York City. But NYCERS is nonetheless only slightly better funded than the NYC teachers pension plan, because the extent of taxpayer pension underfunding has been greater. Indeed, unlike the pension plan for NYC teachers, NYCERS never really got out of the hole after the big pension increases under former Mayor Lindsay in the late 1960s. Further discussion and a spreadsheet with a series of charts are here on “Saying the Unsaid in New York.”