If you’re not worried about the municipal pension crisis in Illinois, you’re not paying attention.

Funding shortfalls to cover pensions for retired police officers, firefighters and other public workers are forcing officials in many towns to lay off employees, put off street repairs or cut other essential services.

“A lot of mayors are being forced to choose between funding the retirements of their police staffs, but to do that they’re having to lay off active police,” said Ted Dabrowski, president of Wirepoints, a group that analyzes data and advocates for taxpayers, mainly in Illinois. “They’re trying to choose which one to fund, active workers or retirees. That’s not a situation they should be in.”

I phoned Dabrowski to ask about reaction to a 39-page report that Wirepoints issued last week, “Communities in Crisis: More Than Half of Illinois Cities Get ‘F’ Grades for Local Pensions.”

“I think people take this seriously in Downstate areas. Around here, major media is not covering it,” he said. “Nobody’s talking about it while the crisis continues to get bigger.”

The average person could be forgiven for tuning out the topic of municipal pension solvency. The subject involves complicated taxation, legislative and legal concerns that cause eyes to gloss over and attention to wander. Getting folks to care is like trying to teach calculus to a

teenager on a glorious day in May.

I’ll do my best to summarize the latest Wirepoints report in plain English.

“An alarming number of municipal pensions have moved closer to insolvency in just 16 years,” Wirepoints reported.

The group compared municipal pension funding levels for 2003 and 2019 in the 175 largest communities in Illinois.

“In 2003, just 21 of the 175 cities analyzed had less than 60 cents on hand for every dollar they needed to fund the future benefits of their police, firefighter and (Illinois Municipal Retirement) funds,” according to the report.

A 60% funding level is often seen as a point of no return, a tipping point from which pension funds cannot recover, authors warned.

“By 2019, 99 of the 175 cities Wirepoints analyzed were below the 60 percent funding level,” according to the report.

That’s a lot of numbers, and many readers who were not members of their school math teams may have already tuned out. In plain English, pension obligations are swallowing huge chunks of your tax dollars, and it’s not enough to fix the problem.

Imagine a sinkhole so big that dump truck loads of material seem to just vanish into a void. Then you might begin to get a handle on how bad the problem has become. The problem cannot be solved by raising taxes and throwing more money into the hole, he said.

“Debts have tripled and quadrupled in places,” Dabrowksi said. “The more money they put in, the hole gets bigger.”

The Wirepoints report contained information about several south and southwest suburban communities. Blue Island, for example, plunged from a score of 71 in 2003 to 34 in 2019, going from a “C” grade to a solid “F.”

Calumet City fell to 46 from a 74 score. Chicago Heights plummeted to 37 from 72. Homewood slumped to 59 from 83. Oak Lawn dropped to 48 from 70. Park Forest tumbled to 51 from 73.

“It’s quite serious,” Kristi DeLaurentiis, executive director of the South Suburban Mayors and Managers Association, told me last week. “It’s a very real concern and challenge.”

Several municipal leaders raised alarms about rising pension costs during a recent media event at which they urged state lawmakers and the governor to fully restore the local share of sales tax revenues disbursed through the Local Government Distributive Fund.

“The General Assembly, in doubling the pension mandates to cities and villages, that has absolutely crushed our budgets,” Palos Hills Mayor Gerald Bennett said during that call. “We have not been able to keep up with the required payments annually.”

Bennett said Palos Hills has seen its pension costs spike to $1.5 million annually from about $500,000 a few years ago. That means the town has $1 million less each year to pay workers, fund infrastructure projects or finance other programs.

In many instances, towns are unable to raise taxes even if they wanted because of legislation that limits the percentage of tax increases from one year to the next.

“The challenge is that we’ve had shrinking property values and rising tax burdens,” DeLaurentiis said.

Many local leaders have done all they can to cut costs by letting staff positions go unfilled or deferring maintenance, but pension costs continue to outpace whatever savings they can muster.

“They’ve held the line or shrunk their budgets,” DeLaurentiis said.

The municipal pension crisis is separate from the more well-known state unfunded pension crisis. The tally for the shortfall in the five state-run pension funds for retired teachers and others reached $137 billion last fall.

“Illinois government workers are now recipients of some of the nation’s most generous retirement benefits,” Dabrowski and John Klingner of Wirepoints wrote in a commentary the Chicago Tribune published in September. “Career public schoolteachers retiring today, for example, can expect to retire in their 50s, get automatic (cost of living adjustments) and end up with an average of $2.9 million in lifetime pension benefits.”

That level of benefit is typical for public employees hired before Jan. 1, 2011. In 2010, the state created a Tier 2 level of lesser benefits for newer employees. The plan, however, did not address the mounting costs of providing benefits promised to Tier 1 workers.

Lawmakers like to “kick the can down the road” and gingerly evade having to address that crisis. People are feeling the pain of the municipal pension crisis, however.

“When you talk about municipal pensions, public safety and public works are the big drivers,” Dabrowksi said. “People notice when you start having a couple less policemen on the force. Safety worsens. With cuts to public works, your roads start to get worse.”

If crime increases in your neighborhood or potholes go unfilled, the municipal pension crisis may be to blame.

Wirepoints and others have repeatedly and with increasing urgency offered solutions that lawmakers and governors have stubbornly ignored. It’s like being in a disaster movie and living at the bottom of a volcano and feeling the rumbling of an imminent eruption and still ignoring the warnings.

“We’d have to amend the Illinois Constitution to diminish benefits,” the naysayers seem to whine. “Or we’d have to get the unions to sit down and negotiate reductions in benefits.”

Lawmakers passed a pension reform law in 2013, but the Illinois Supreme Court in 2015 ruled the law unconstitutional because it sought to reduce benefits that already were granted.

In addition to seeking a voter referendum to amend the constitution’s benefits-diminishment clause, lawmakers could move all state workers to 401(k)-style accounts, suspend automatic 3% annual cost-of-living raises for pension recipients and require state retirees to pay their fair share of health insurance costs, Wirepoints has suggested. Those reforms would save $5 billion a year, the group said.

Leaders of communities throughout the south suburbs and across Illinois should not be forced to choose between paying their active workers or their retired ones. More Illinois residents should demand lawmakers address funding shortfalls for state and municipal pension systems.

tslowik@tribpub.com