Back in the 1990’s police unions negotiated for benefits likes salaries, health insurance and pensions. During the early years of the first decade of the 21st Century, investment banking and, in fact, often regular banking left its conservative investment moorings and struck out into mortgage “securities” and other strange ideas of what an “investment” might be.

Cities and States (even universities) got caught up in the lure of easy investment profits. Pensions suffered when these “investments” disentegrated.

And this is one of the results – from the Baltimore Sun:

Union leaders, who stress the dangerous and grueling nature of police and fire work, have resisted the pension changes that the city has proposed, saying they constitute a violation of their contract.

“Some in city government are portraying this as a crisis,” said Bob Sledgeski, president of the firefighters union. “This has been long, ongoing neglect on the part of the city to follow their own experts’ advice. That’s not an accident, and 10 years does not a crisis make.”

City Council members, led by Helen L. Holton, chairwoman of the taxation and finance committee, have been scrambling for a solution to the pension problem before the fiscal year ends June 30.

Scores of police and firefighters have threatened to resign or retire if their benefits are significantly diminished. But city officials, grappling with a $121 million overall budget shortfall, say they cannot pay much more than the currently allotted $101 million pension contribution, although the city’s required obligations would be about $166 million if no changes are made in the way benefits are calculated.

I might have been more sympathetic to the city’s financial plight if they hadn’t played with the money.

That money was not a pile of gambling chips. It was a contractual promise.

These people being penalized are not wealthy entrepeneurs, they are the police and firefighters of the city.

Everyone talks about their sacrifice and bravery right up until it comes time to write the pension checks.

And then it looks like, well, it wasn’t really a promise. Apparently they only meant it if they could play with the money and not lose it.

And they lost it.

James Pilant