(The Center Square) – It’s now up to the Illinois Supreme Court to decide what to do with a challenge to the state’s consolidated public safety pension funds.
The law approved in 2019 took the state’s 650 firefighter and police pension funds outside of Chicago and consolidated them into two separate funds. Each local fund retained a separate account managing operation and the financial condition of each participating pension fund with the power to adjudicate and award retirement and other benefits from the funds.
The law was challenged by 14 local public safety pension funds. The Kane County trial court dismissed the case. Earlier this year, the Appellate Court of Illinois’ Second District upheld the lower court’s ruling. The Illinois Supreme Court took the case up this summer and heard arguments in Springfield Tuesday.
Plaintiffs attorney Daniel Konicek argued to the Illinois Supreme Court Tuesday the law is unconstitutional.
“It terminated the right of a five-person board for the police and a five-person board for the fireman to control and manage what had been since the pre-1970 Constitution protection clause,” Konicek said.
He further said among other alleged harms of the consolidation, the voting power of pension participants was negatively impacted.
“It completely and undeniably diluted their ability to put people on a five-person board that they knew versus these new boards of people that are statewide and they don’t know,” Konicek argued.
Defending the law, Assistant Attorney General Richard Huszagh said the consolidation was for the purpose of increasing investment opportunities.
“All those local funds stay as they always have been,” Huszagh said. “They all have their own assets. They are all administered by their own boards which are elected in the same way that they have always been elected.”
The local boards still have control of their member’s funds, Huszagh argued.
“It does not reduce by a penny the payments made to any of the members of any of these funds,” Huszagh said. “It doesn’t change the formulas for these local boards to determine the amount of those payments.”
The court took the case under advisement.
For fiscal year 2022, there was a total of $8 billion in assets for the Illinois Firefighters’ Pension Investment Fund. Around $9.1 billion in assets was reported in the Illinois Police Officer’s Pension Investment Fund.
