Pension reform moves closer
Proposal cuts 3 pro-firefighter amendments
The Legislature is expected to take its final votes on Houston’s pension reform legislation within days after a group of House and Senate lawmakers Sunday night hashed out the differences between their chambers’ versions and produced a final bill.
Stripped from the proposal that emerged Sunday evening were three amendments backed by firefighters and opposed by City Hall, said state Sen. Joan Huffman, a Houston Republican who carried the measure in the upper chamber and who was among the 10 lawmakers tasked with reconciling the bills. The excised amendments had been added earlier this month when the House followed the Senate in approving its version the reform package.
“It’s a great bill that’s good for the taxpayers, for retirees and for the employees,” Huffman said late Sunday. “I think it is a good solution.”
The development puts Mayor Sylvester Turner on the doorstep of a landmark achievement that he has made the central focus of his first year and a half in office and that aims to end a 16-year crisis that has increasingly imperiled the city’s finances.
“There is only one step left for the Legislature to take,” the mayor said late
Sunday. “Houston needs their support for our police officers, municipal employees, firefighters and Houston taxpayers. We cannot afford to fail. I believe the Legislature won’t let us down.”
Firefighters pension chairman David Keller, whose board opposes the reforms, could not be reached for comment late Sunday, but he had hinted last week that what the conference committee produced might be unwelcome to his members.
In a statement released after the House named its five appointees to the conference committee — four of whom were to be authors or sponsors of the bill who had spoken against the firefighter-backed amendments — Keller said the Legislature was continuing its “punitive treatment of Houston firefighters.”
In the end, nine of the 10 members of the conference committee signed to indicate their agreement with the final bill, according to a photo of the document obtained by the Chronicle.
The stripped amendments would have given the firefighters more time to negotiate, exempted retired firefighters from benefit cuts — at an estimated cost of $400 million, city officials said — or made firefighter benefit cuts contingent on the passage of a $1 billion pension bond referendum that is expected to be held this fall.
That last provision already applies to the benefit cuts being made by the police and municipal pension funds, since the bond dollars are to be infused into their underfunded pensions, and were a key bargaining chip to get those groups to agree to a second or third round of cuts to their retirement benefits since 2001.
That year, the Legislature passed benefit increases that caused costs to skyrocket rather than increase slightly, as flawed studies had predicted, launching Houston’s pension crisis.