Friday night was Legislative Skits night, an annual event in which legislative staff parody and pillory the legislators. This week's edition of Capitol Undercurrents brings you some high and lowlights.

Empty ... rhetoric--A running gag throughout the skits had 'Oscars'-style awards presented to various legislators. The award itself was one of the hollow glass heads the State Chamber of Commerce gave to each legislator earlier this session. Winners included Kevin Meyer for best campaign commercial (itself a spoof of GEICO insurance ads), Pete Kott for best job getting back in the majority's good graces after an attempted coup, and Woodie Salmon for best floor speech (his now infamous "we've been here for 12,000 years" comments on the ANWR resolution.)

Calling Names--The audience doesn't usually get to see the titles of the various skits - just the acting. One particularly clever piece this year mocked the House budget subcommittee closeout on the Department of Administration's budget, which was noteworthy for the chair being on the losing side of the vote on several amendments. Done in the style of a Hong Kong action movie, complete with poorly synced voiceover, it was titled. "Crouching Amendment, Rolling Chair."

Running gag II--After the uproar over drinking in the Capitol earlier this session that saw a security guard fired over a letter claiming that on any given day in any given office, someone would be drinking alcohol, the skits made hay. A vending machine sat on the stage, retrofitted with beer posters in place of soda logos. From time to time, actors would stop what they were doing, dispense a can of suds, and continue the skit. Several times during the show, someone dressed as a Capitol building security guard would walk through, and everyone would hide their bottles and cans.

Kudos--Acting in the skits can be a little dicey. The cast is, after all, political staff, not polished thespians. And there's a rumor that they don't all do the show sober. Nevertheless, there are always some remarkable impersonations. My favorites this year were a generic Democratic staffer, with a peace symbol around her neck, counseling legislators that titles like "secretary" or "staff" were repressive; a depiction of deep-voiced Rep. Bob Lynn by a staffer with a gravelly baritone that made him hard to understand, Rep. Jay Ramras played by a guy in a chicken suit clucking "fries and a pickle!" (if you don't know, ask someone from Fairbanks) and an over-the-top parody of Kodiak Rep. Gabrielle LeDoux that put the audience in mind of Katherine Hepburn if she'd gone into politics instead of acting.

     "Legislation should be as carefully crafted as a prayer." I don't remember who said it first but I've often repeated it.
     Here I go again for the umpteenth time: "Legislation should be as carefully crafted as a prayer." Especially when it comes to SB141--the new, radical TRS/PERS pension rewrite for future teachers, state workers, and employees of Alaska municipalities.
     Many of us learned in Sunday School that before offering prayers we must: 1) define the challenges; and 2) understand how solutions play out if our prayers are answered. SB141 fails these prayer 'standards'. Legislative advocates of the SB141 pension "fix" don't know the dimensions of the pension fund challenges and don't yet understand the ramifications of their proposed solutions. 
     Here's the core of SB141: the bill changes state and municipal public employee and teacher retirement packages from a defined benefit pension that future retirees can count on to a defined contribution plan where retirement benefits depend upon the vagaries of the stock market, future health care costs, and how long you live. The bill reduces contributions by the employer and it raises contributions for most employees. The bill restricts and delays medical coverage. These fundamental changes shift risk from the state to the employee and most employees then pay more for accepting the higher risks.
     So, before we glom on to solutions proposed in SB141 that upend existing retirement plans, let's take a deep breath. Let's think this through, as we would a prayer, and identify the challenges and assess what happens if SB141 passes.
     The purported "problem" is that our pension funds for public workers and public school teachers can right now pay only about 70 percent of the pension obligations if everyone covered (retirement eligible or not) quit tomorrow. An analogy is that a family's savings may only cover 70 percent of house debt if the bank calls the mortgage tomorrow. 
     Here's the "problem" context we must understand before making any radical pension decisions:

• The 70 percent or so figure is advanced by the state's long-time pension fund advisor. (The biggest reason we're at 70 percent instead of the ideal but rarely accomplished 100 percent is because we've been following that advisor's badly flawed advice.)
• SB141 is not the draft of a panel of professional pension folks, it's a scheme crafted by a panel of politicians. (It is important to note many of the politicians who designed and will vote on SB141 were complicit a few years ago in the GOP majority's five-year, $250 million budget cut plan. This is an important footnote because these politicians ignored stock market and health care cost warning signs and went ahead and reduced state employer contributions to the PERS and TRS pension plans. The PERS state employer reduction alone was $247.3 million over the five years beginning in FY96 to meet artificial majority budget cut goals in a way that avoided cutting services. State employee contributions, by the way, were not cut.)
• Many of the findings and rationale presented in support of SB141 are lifted almost verbatim from a right wing public policy group funded by corporations and trade associations and guided by ultra conservative Outside politicians. (The obvious question is: are Alaska's pension problems being defined by lower 48 political and special interest groups with a national agenda or by pension professionals guided by Alaska's imperatives?)
• SB141 is a significant reduction of benefits and a significant assumption of retirement risk for future Alaska teachers and public employees. (Couple the SB141 'solution' with two real, not hypothetical, facts: 1) state government payroll per worker has dropped 31 percent since 1984 after adjustment for inflation; and 2) teacher pay is far less competitive than it was even a decade ago.)
• Cutting retirement benefits while we let inflation erode pay scales threatens important public services. (Do we want nurses who protect public health, engineers who build our bridges, or biologists who manage our fisheries to be public servants who graduated in the bottom half of their college classes and can't get jobs with better pay and benefits elsewhere?)
• The new retirement tier contemplated in SB141 makes absolutely no difference to the health of the pension funds until at least 2015. (Even after two decades the "solutions" proposed in SB141 would only lift us from the 70 percent funding level to 76 percent.)
• Messing with Alaska retirement benefits must be done in the context of federal changes to Social Security, changes to Medicare, and changes to tax codes so that our benefits protect a minimal quality of life after retirement.