#4

This is a continuation of #3 because I found some information from a few years ago that I had forgotten. Background Teacher Retirement plans Minnesota LCPR rev 10/2012

All three will fail with Minneapolis being first (MTRFA) but some details are very interesting and disgusting. The post-retirement adjustment procedure now starts with the word faulty and remember that only three major public retirement plans took extra profits (MSRS, PERA and TRA) and gave them away and those three were from Minnesota. All three major teacher plans jumped on this opportunity as well to bonus retirees even though all three plans were under funded.

Minneapolis (MTRFA) was the first to go bankrupt because they had financial problems for decades and I showed a graph where MTRFA had lost over 700 million dollars during a twenty year period due to financial ineptness, never matching benchmarks. Of course, taxpayers will pay again. MTRFA merged with TRA in 2006.

MTRFA joined the faulty process in 1993, Duluth (DTRFA) in 1995 and St. Paul (SPTRFA) in 1997. SPTRFA was in trouble already and was taking increasing large bailouts from taxpayers $200,000 in 1998, $400,000 in 1999, $600,000 in 2000, $800,000 in 2001 and thereafter. This from the school district. The state gave $4.827 million in 1998 and $2.827 million annually thereafter. These bailouts would become much larger in future years.

So, SPTRFA is taking in bailouts to help their fund and at the same time is handing out bonuses to retirees which hurts the fund. SPTRFA watched MTRFA go bankrupt but kept up the faulty procedure for years. Again leaders want to fail to receive even larger bailouts in future years.

I call this unethical so I looked into Minnesota state ethics. The legislature is mostly self governing it reads.

No help there. When I testified last spring at a LCPR meeting I called their process a slow motion white collar crime over years and decades. Now I read in Mn ethics that “The rules of the House and Senate are not laws, a member violating one of the rules cannot be arrested, tried, or sentenced in a court of law, nor can the violation of any of the statutes in Minnesota statutes 10A be considered a crime”

Pension officials can’t be criminals because it says so on a piece of paper.

I have just spoken to an ethics official about a couple issues and am waiting but this shows me that it’s the Wild West and leaders can do whatever they can get away with. There are more examples and I hope you care.

If you're interested in learning more about what makes Minnesota such an outlier when it comes to handling their pension program please email me at kubes5t6@gmail.com.