We know, we couldn’t believe what we were reading either. In an editorial this week, the Denver Post echoed what the right has been shouting from the rooftops for the last few years – PERA, Colorado’s public employee retirement plan, needs reform and Walker Stapleton was right. Here’s what the Denver Post wrote:
“There are no easy answers left for repairing the fiscal health of Colorado’s Public Employees’ Retirement Association, but admitting that the $47 billion pension is sick is half the battle.
“State Treasurer Walker Stapleton has admirably been beating that drum for years — and in thanks some have labeled him an alarmist — but the bleak new financial picture for PERA, laid out last Friday, makes it clear Stapleton has been right all along.”
While we cheer that the Denver Post has finally come to its senses, it is disheartening that it took so long for them to come to this Great Awakening. And what was the straw that broke the camel’s back? It was an admission by PERA chief Greg Smith, who told the Post that “the new financial outlook accounts for a lower expected return on investment and longer lives of retirees as ‘a much higher-risk profile than we’re comfortable with.'”
The Denver Post was right to call for PERA reform and to credit Stapleton with calling for it; however, we just wish it would not have taken so long.