PERA cost-of-living adjustments should be tied to inflation

“A sound plan to save PERA,” Oct. 1 editorial. Your editorial on PERA got a lot right, but veered way off course regarding cost-of-living adjustments. There is a good reason nobody proposes reducing Social Security COLA increases. That same reason applies to PERA. Nobody wants to see thousands of retired teachers and patrol officers forced to go on food stamps at the age of 80-something. Equally important is that the lack of real inflation protection for pensions would aggravate recruitment problems for Colo- rado school districts and other public service employers. A better approach would be to replace the 2 percent fixed COLA with actual inflation rate increases like Social Security uses. PERA would probably have to limit its increases to no more than 2 percent if inflation is higher than that, but this approach would reduce the cost of the COLA to PERA while still allowing retirees to maintain the purchasing power of their pensions — at least while inflation is relatively low. Send letters of 150 words or fewer to openforum@denverpost.com or 101 W. Colfax Ave., Suite 800, Denver, CO, 80202. Please include full name, city and phone number. Contact information is for our purposes only; we will not share it with anyone else. You can reach us by telephone at 303-954-1331.