46th District State Senate Candidates: Pension Reform

Pat Sullivan: We're going to take everyone at the table, instead of just four leaders. We need to get everyone at the table and talk pension reform. But we've got to take care of the people that we've made promises to, also. They've earned a lot of their pension and we can't take that away from them. But we need to take everyone we can at the table on this. This is going to be hard to do and we need to have everybody present, not just four people from Chicago.

Dave Koehler: Well number one, I think it takes having everyone at the table. The one thing that's bothered me about all the discussions and all the meetings that have taken place so far about pension reform is that we don't have the judges there. And people wondered why. Why do we exclude the folks that are getting the highest pension in the state? Everybody ought to be at the table and we ought to negotiate this so that it's fair and so that it does the job that we want it to do and that is to make a sustainable system. There are lots of models out there we could use different examples for. Rhode Island is probably the lead state in pension reform. I'm not saying to just take the Rhode Island plan and mirror it in Illinois, but I am saying that there are some concepts that we ought to look at. They've taken a pension system that was in trouble as much as ours and they negotiated both a defined benefit and a defined contribution plan to work in conjunction with one another. Those are some things we ought to look at. But we've got to do meaningful pension reform and we've got to do it now.