Chicago Slapped With Credit Downgrade; Moody’s Cites Pension Liabilities As City Flirts With Junk Status

chicago

Credit rating agency Moody’s hit Chicago with a credit downgrade on Friday, cutting the city’s rating to Baa2 – two steps above junk bond status.

Notably, Moody’s indicated that the city could face future downgrades even if its 2014 pension reforms withstand legal challenges.

Pension360 has covered the city’s ballooning pension payments, which could exceed $1.5 billion annually by 2019.

More on the downgrade from Bloomberg:

“The city’s credit quality could weaken as unfunded pension liabilities grow and exert increased pressure on the city’s operating budget,” Moody’s analysts Matthew Butler and Rachel Cortez wrote. “We expect substantial growth in unfunded pension liabilities even if the city’s recent pension reforms survive an ongoing legal challenge.”

Chicago is obligated to pay $600 million into four pension funds in next year’s budget, though Standard & Poor’s said the contribution may be delayed after Feb. 24 elections led to an unexpected runoff vote between Emanuel and Jesus “Chuy” Garcia.

[…]

The third-most-populous U.S. city has $20 billion in unfunded pension obligations that it can’t address without the approval of the state legislature. State lawmakers in June restructured two city pension plans with about $9.4 billion in underfunded liabilities for about 60,000 municipal workers and retirees by making them pay more and reducing benefits. The changes didn’t apply to the police and fire systems.

Labor unions in Chicago sued to block the law in December, and the litigation was put on hold pending the outcome of an Illinois Supreme Court ruling on a state pension overhaul.

While Illinois is the lowest-rated state, credit raters differ on Chicago’s standing. S&P grades the city A+, the fifth-highest rank and four levels above Moody’s. Fitch Ratings ranks it two steps higher than Moody’s.

Chicago has the lowest credit rating of any major city in the country, excluding Detroit.

 

Photo by bitsorf via Flickr CC License

Chicago Could See Credit Downgrade If Pension Changes Are Suspended Pending Lawsuit

chicago

Unions and retirees are currently challenging Chicago’s 2014 pension changes, and they are asking a judge to stop the implementation of the changes – which took effect Jan. 1 – until the lawsuit is resolved.

But a Chicago official said on Thursday that such an injunction could spur a credit rating downgrade from all three major rating agencies.

From Reuters:

Chief Financial Officer Lois Scott testified in Cook County Circuit Court that all three major credit ratings agencies have negative outlooks on Chicago’s ratings, largely due to a big unfunded pension liability that a 2014 Illinois law aims to ease for the city’s municipal and laborers’ funds.

Labor unions and retirees who are challenging the law, which took effect Jan. 1, have asked Associate Judge Rita Novak to temporarily stop it.

“I think that anything that arrests progress significantly increases our risk of downgrades,” Scott testified.

Scott said Chicago’s ratings are already lower than most big U.S. cities and that further downgrades would pump up interest rates on new fixed-rate bonds and thin the ranks of potential bond buyers and credit providers. She added the termination of interest-rate hedges and letters of credit on existing variable-rate bonds could be triggered, costing Chicago hundreds of millions of dollars.

The 2014 pension changes require city employees to contribute more to the system. The city’s contribution rate was increased, as well. Lastly, the calculation of COLAs is now linked to inflation; previously, the COLA was set at 3 percent annually.

 

Photo by bitsorf via Flickr CC LIcense

Chicago Proposes Telephone Tax to Shore Up Pension Funding

Rahm_Emanuel_Oval_Office_Barack_Obama

Chicago politicians have been putting their heads together in recent months, trying to come up with ways to solve—or at least head off—the outstanding pension obligations that threaten to cripple the city’s finances.

A recent law mandates that the city make lump sum payments into the System each year to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s up to lawmakers to find that money.

The first idea to increase was property taxes. But the move is so politically unpalatable that Illinois Pat Gov. Quinn struck a deal with Chicago: in exchange for the promise of no property tax increases, Quinn signed a bill that increased employee contributions to the city’s pension systems while also reducing employee benefits.

Now, many alderman have thrown their support behind a new idea for raising money: a telephone tax. More specifically, a 56 percent increase of the current telephone tax. From the Sun-Times:

Effective Sept. 1, the City Council’s Finance Committee agreed to raise the surcharge from $2.50 to $3.90–$1.40 more-per-month or $16.80-a-year–for every land line and cell phone in Chicago. The tax applied to pre-paid phones will rise from 7-to-9 percent, effective Oct. 1.

A family of four with four cell phones and a land-line would end up paying $84 in additional taxes each year. That’s $34-per-year more than the $50 price of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s original plan to raise property taxes by $250 million over a five-year period to shore up two of Chicago’s four city employee pension funds.

On Tuesday, the Finance Committee honored the mayor’s promise without a single dissenting vote. That’s how eager they all are to avoid a property tax increase — the third rail of Chicago politics—seven months before the election.

The new revenue–$10 million this year and $40 million in 2015–will be used to “fully-fund” Chicago’s 911 emergency center and the Office of Emergency Management and Communications that runs it, thereby freeing up $50 million “to be contributed for the first payment” to reform the Municipal Employees and Laborers pension funds.

Taxing telephones is politically preferable to raising property taxes, which was the other option to raise funds to pay down Chicago’s outstanding pension obligation. Raising property taxes is a political no-no in the city.

But the telephone tax might turn out to be more costly, to both Chicago residents and the city itself. And some alderman have publicly wondered whether the city and the state are playing a political game. From the Sun-Times:

The fact that some Chicago families could end up paying more did not seem to bother most aldermen.

“Even though it may cost a little more because you have more lines and phones, I’d rather come up with an additional $5 or $10 than to come up with $150 [all at once]. It may not be as much pain monthly as it would be at one time,” said Budget Committee Chairman Carrie Austin (34th).

Budget Director Alex Holt added, “For some people, it may be more costly [than a property tax hike]. For others, it will be less costly. It’s  going to be different for every home.”

Emanuel has emphatically denied that the phone tax was part of a political “shell game” to get past the Nov. 4 gubernatorial election and the Feb. 24 city election for mayor and aldermen, then sock it to taxpayers.

Ald. Scott Waguespack (32nd) said Tuesday he doesn’t buy it.

“We had this whole property tax issue on the table. Then, I thought I saw somebody [Emanuel] specifically say we’re holding it off for a year. Which means, it’s back on the table after the election,” Waguespack said.

“So, this is just to me sort of a short-term fix. It doesn’t solve the bigger structural problems we have. And it doesn’t put any other solutions on the table that we’ve had three years of talking about and haven’t proposed anything.”

Chicago’s largest fund, the Chicago Municipal Employees Annuity & Benefit Fund, was only 37 percent funded as of December 2012, according to the fund’s most recent annual report.

 

Photo: Pete Souza [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons