PSERS's new board member won with 4% support
Was this an election, or a survey?
The underfunded Pennsylvania Public School Employees' Retirement System says it has a winner:
After voiding its previous poll for "minor irregularities," PSERS late Friday named Virginia Lastner as trustee, representing Pennsylvania's 500 regional school boards, who will pay more than $1.5 billion from local property taxes this year to keep PSERS from getting more insolvent. She got the most votes of 12 candidates.
But was this an election, or a sampling survey? Lastner received just 189 votes out of 4,500 eligible elected school directors at the state's 500 school districts, according to the Pennsylvania Association of School Boards. Only 1,022 eligible votes were received by PSERS. So more than 80% of directors didn't vote; less than 20% of those who did vote, chose Lastner.
The brief candidate surveys didn't give directors much to go on as to any policy differences.
Lastner beat runner-up Eric DiTullio of Seneca Valley (near Pittsburgh) by 27 votes, and also bested lesser vote-getters, including Paul Stepanoff of Quakertown and Raeann Hofkin of Upper Perkiomen, both of whom have questioned whether districts should and can afford to continue splitting a 25%-and-rising payroll surcharge with state taxpayers to keep PSERS afloat. (Neither was willing to drop out in the other's favor.)
Lower investment projections mean the system will have to squeeze more money out of state and school taxpayers, either directly ("employer contributions") or from teachers ("employee contributions"), unless they can get current teachers to agree to collect lower pensions.
But PSERS partly compensated for that more daunting projection by also reducing its projection for annual salary growth to 5% a year, from the current 5.5%; and by reducing its inflation expectation to 2.75% a year, from the current 3% (indeed, U.S. inflation has been below 2% in recent years).
In a statement, PSERS boss and former state rep. Glen Grell said the targets were changed after "much discussion" and a "thorough review" with consultants Aon-Hewitt and Buck Consultants LLC, and that Pennsylvania now has "one of the more conservative return assumptions" among U.S. state pension systems.