Since May, when the Illinois Supreme Court tossed out a controversial 2013 pension law that legislators said would resolve the massive $100 billion hole in the state’s pension system, the chips have been falling where they may — most recently, for instance, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel acknowledged that the city’s school system may be near insolvency.
But River Forest resident Ralph Martire — who heads the bipartisan research group Center for Tax and Budget Accountability (CTBA) —has been perhaps the most vocal proponent of what various media outlets and policy experts say could be the best plan to fix the state’s fiscal mess.
Martire’s budget wisdom has been on display everywhere from Crain’s Chicago Business to the television show Chicago Tonight. But to his family and neighbors, he’s just Ralph.
“I’m the guy in my backyard relatively clueless about how to fix whatever I’m trying to fix,” Martire quipped. “Thankfully, my neighbor Tim knows how to fix stuff in the yard. He comes over and helps me.”
Martire said his day-to-day hasn’t been affected much by all of the media attention his job brings. It’s of particular insignificance to his two kids. Martire’s son is an incoming senior at Oak Park and River Forest High School and his daughter is a District 90 incoming eighth-grader.
“It’s funny, my kids would be flipping through the TV after dinner and they’ll see me on Chicago Tonight and they go, ‘Oh, that’s just dad, well let’s find something more interesting.’ And they click right by. They already know what I’ve got to say,” said the River Forest District 90 school board member.
What Martire has got to say is becoming increasingly relevant as the state runs out of viable solutions to solving its pension predicament. The CTBA, in fact, testified against the pension reform law, also known as SB 1, when it was up for discussion in Springfield.
“We said here’s how the Supreme Court is going to rule and the court ruled exactly as we said they would,” Martire recalled in a recent interview. “We’ve said all along that the Illinois Constitution has very clear, unambiguous language. ‘Public employee pensions shall not be diminished or impaired.’ You cannot reduce them. So once you’ve run up this liability, you’ve just got to find a way to pay for it.”
The court cited the CTBA’s plan for solving the pension crisis in its landmark decision, a fact that Martire offered as a demonstration of the plan’s viability.
“We were the only organization that identified a way to actually solve the unfunded pension liability in Illinois that is both constitutional and fiscally doable,” he said. “No one else has put such a simple solution on the table and it’s really simple. The only way we can do that, given our current mix of tax revenues, is to find a level dollar amount, just like a mortgage payment, and pay the same amount every single year over [roughly] 43 years.”
Martire said the plan, which calls for a variety of revenue-raising measures, such as taxing consumer services, would grow the state’s funded ratio each year and bring the pensions back to health — in addition to paying the costs of core services, such as public safety, health care, social services and education.
“This creates a doable payment schedule, which the Supreme Court noted in its decision. It also noted that this is one of the options that the state should have pursued rather than going to the unconstitutional option of cutting benefits,” Martire said.