is the Philadelphia controller

What would you say if someone said you could lower your mortgage payment from $1,000 to $120 a month and catch up later? You would have a host of questions, including "What's the catch?" and "What will it cost in the long run?" That is precisely the issue as Harrisburg debates the new municipal pension bill.

The near-collapse of the stock market last fall caused a rapid drop in the value of the city's pension fund and accelerated the city's legally mandated contribution to the fund.

The city's inability to cover both the unfunded liability of our fund and the ongoing cost of providing essential city services, such as police, fire protection, and trash collection, have led to our current financial crisis.

To soften the impact of the meltdown on Wall Street, I proposed extending the city's pension-fund payment schedule - eliminating hundreds of millions of dollars in payments that would have been due over the next five years. Mayor Nutter, union trustees, and all pension board trustees joined me, back in February, in announcing this proposal.

While the specific details were subsequently altered by Nutter and City Council, they maintained the basic core of a plan that incorporated a short-term postponement of shockingly high pension contributions and extended the time the city had to achieve the goal of a fully funded pension plan.

As a security measure, the mayor and Council added a temporary sales-tax increase sufficient to pay back an estimated $235 million to the pension fund during the two-year deferral period. This became the foundation for House Bill 1828.

Somehow, the state Senate turned the mayor's Philadelphia-specific proposal into a statewide pension-reform bill - aimed at providing relief for other distressed municipal pension plans in Pennsylvania.

While the intent was to lower pension costs and stave off insolvency of funds, the bill could actually move Philadelphia's fund toward insolvency. It will also saddle future Philadelphia taxpayers with an annual pension bill that could exceed $1 billion out of what is expected to be a total annual operating budget of $5.6 billion in 2024.

This means that the share of the city's operating budget devoted to pension costs would increase from 11 percent today to between 15 percent and 20 percent by 2024; pension costs would squeeze out vital city services.

While the bill appears to exclude Philadelphia from any state takeover, actuarial analysis concludes otherwise. A state takeover is virtually inevitable by 2016. That raises two problems:

One, the Pennsylvania Municipal Retirement System would go from managing small accounts to handling a multibillion-dollar fund. Two, for eight years Philadelphia would pay only a fraction of its pension contributions. In the first year of a takeover, the city would contribute only 12.5 percent of what it now pays, followed by 25 percent the following year, and an additional 12.5 percent every year thereafter for eight years.

At that point, Philadelphia's pension costs could near or exceed $1 billion per year.

You can't dig yourself out of debt by taking an eight-year holiday from making your normal debt repayments.

Local legislators and elected officials from Philadelphia are being put in an impossible position. The mayor and Philadelphians urgently need approval of a sales-tax increase and pension-deferral plan to avert the layoffs of an estimated 1,000 police officers and 200 firefighters, and the dismantling of weekly trash removal and other vital services.

While no responsible person wants to trigger such a calamity, it is neither wise nor prudent to trade the city's sound financial future for solving the immediate fiscal crisis this way.

These provisions in HB 1828 should be cleaned up. The legislature should analyze the full consequences of this bill in an open process where the numbers and facts can be fleshed out, the specific language can be clearly defined, and the financial impact accurately determined.

Right now, the bill requires an actuarial note outlining the financial consequences of this legislation within five days after it's signed into law. We should have that information before the bill becomes law.

Philadelphians shouldn't have to endure the unnecessary deaths and injuries that will result from police and fire layoffs, or the destruction of its economic base that will result if trash piles up, in order for the legislature to get statewide pension reform right.

Philadelphia should get the legislation it needs now. Its proposals have been vetted, and everyone understands their consequences. Then, statewide pension reform should be similarly vetted and voted on its merits.