One of the major issues with balancing the state budget in Oregon is the amount of money needed to make sure retired public workers get the pensions they were promised.
PERS, the Public Employee Retiree System, needs more money to match what retirees expect with what has been saved for them.
knows PERS from both labor and management sides. He worked for a couple of Oregon governors and once led the AFL-CIO in the state. We pick his brain for some insights into how PERS got into a budgetary hole, and what it might take to dig out.
