John Reitmeyer
In New Jersey, school districts pay the salaries of their teachers, but it’s the state that picks up the costs of their retirements. Cities and towns, meanwhile, cover their employees’ salaries as well as their retirement costs.
That split responsibility is at the heart of one of the core elements of the sweeping changes to public employee benefits that were put forward last week by the nonpartisan commission of experts impaneled by Gov. Chris Christie. Boxed in by a state economy that hasn’t grown as quickly as he once envisioned and a recent court ruling ordering billions in additional state pension contributions, Christie charged the group with finding ways to make worker benefits more affordable.
The commission has proposed shifting the cost of teacher pensions from the state to the school districts, whose primary source of funding is local property taxes. It is also proposing the adoption of less-generous health coverage for teachers and other public workers, and it made the case that there would be enough savings from changing the health plans to allow the local governments to cover the cost of the pensions, which right now cost the state about $2.5 billion annually just for teachers.
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