Thursday, July 20, 2006

Mamas don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys

Or Tier 1 PERS retirees either (too late, I guess). It's been pretty boring out in PERS-land lately. The only real news has come in the past week or so. PERS announced the 2006 COLA increase today (2% for everyone EXCEPT the window retirees) - so what else is new? The Supreme Court issued its way too long awaited decision in the petition for an award of attorneys' fees to the plaintiffs in the Strunk Case. The Court agreed that the plaintiffs were entitled to something, but then punted to a special master to duke it out with the plaintiffs and the defendants on how much the award should be. The Sartain (COLA freeze) piece of the Strunk case cost more than $350,000 to litigate. Wonder how much the special master will see fit to award. The legal systems continues to grind along at a snail's pace. A hearing is set for September 28th in the Arken case (Window retiree) to consider the motion of summary judgement. The Robinson case is also buzzing along at about the same speed (slowly). For those of you holding out hope for a quick resolution of any of this, I'm laying my personal odds that the current cases won't run out their legal string until about 2008, with some final resolution around 2010. More optimistic predictions focus on 2009. What's one year at this point? AFSCME is holding a Q&A session on PERS this coming Monday night (July 24th at their Portland headquarters). Call AFSCME if you're interested in attending.

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