I sent the following to the bill sponsors (Pelton, Kolker, Garcia Sander, Lukens) as well as my district representatives (Carson, Marshall). If you have an opinion on this bill, you should consider sending something (or calling) the bill sponsors and your representatives.
Senators Pelton, Kolker, and Carson, and Representatives Garcia Sander, Lukens and Marshall:
I am writing to express my opposition to SB25-147 as it is currently written. There is currently no way to submit written testimony on the Testimony Sign Up page, as SB25-147 is not currently a choice, so I am emailing you directly, but this also serves as my written testimony should that eventually become available.
There are two provisions of the bill that I disagree with.
First, I disagree with the proposed term limits for PERA Board of Trustees members (Section 2). Colorado PERA is a very complex plan. When Trustees are first elected (or appointed) to the Board, it takes a good two years before they are fully up to speed with the complexities, intricacies, and nuances of the plan. By imposing an eight-year limit, you are guaranteeing that for at least 25% of their time on the Board they are not fully educated about the issues they are dealing with
If anything, I believe there is too much turnover on the Board and I would like to see measures taken that would encourage folks to serve on the Board for a longer time period. If you look at the current Board members, only four of the sixteen members have served longer than two terms (and one of those is a non-voting member, and one is not seeking reelection this year). Of the remaining eleven members (excluding the Treasurer), the average tenure on the Board is only 1.8 years. With a plan as complex as PERA, there is great value in having Board members who not only have knowledge and experience, but who also bring some “institutional memory” to the position. By artificially limiting that ability, you are compromising the Board being able to act in the best long-term interests of PERA members and stakeholders.
If you still feel like term limits are necessary, I would ask you to consider modifying the bill to either three, four-year terms, or two terms but extend the length of each term to six years. In either case that would allow a total of twelve years on the Board, which would go a long way to passing along that knowledge, experience, and institutional memory to newer Board members.
Second, I disagree with the proposed Section 3 (12a, IV, b). Specifically, I see no value in annually publishing the name of each PERA employee and their annual compensation. If you have a particular concern with employee compensation, then you should address that concern specifically, not expose the names and salaries of the public servants who work for PERA.
Thank you for your consideration.
Signature, address, and phone number
Addendum 2-15-25: I would add on to my term-limit comments to note that, frankly, we have the same problem in the Colorado Legislature.
- How many of our current legislators are knowledgeable about SB 99-90, the legislation the Legislature and Governor Owens passed in 1999 that has significantly contributed to PERA’s underfunded status? (PERA was 103% funded at that time.)
- Or how many are knowledgeable about SB 10-001, the 2010 legislation that was the first major reform legislation to address the underfunding caused by SB 99-90 and the Great Recession?
- Or how many are knowledgeable about SB 18-200, the 2018 legislation that further addressed PERA’s long-term funding? (The majority of today’s legislators were not serving in 2018.)
Understanding each of these pieces of legislation, as well as the discussions and compromises that occurred when they were passed, is crucial to understanding PERA’s funded status. Yet if you quizzed the 100 people currently server in the Colorado legislature, I suspect they would rank as “not proficient” on the standard.
Fisch Financial 