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I have no inside information. I also didn’t say anything that contradicted any testimony from the other night. I’m also not asking you to take the word of an anonymous internet commenter. I didn’t say 2% contributions offset the cost of retirement by 30%, a licensed actuary did. I said it offset retirement costs by several hundred thousand dollars which it indisputably does.

And the “three amigos” weren’t saying retirement costs aren’t calculable, just that it’s not possible to give an exact dollar amount without knowing when an employee is hired.

Hypothetical...suppose the city council proposed an ordinance tomorrow that required that anyone hired by the WFD after 2/1/2020 had to contribute a 25% copay to their healthcare in retirement. This ordinance would require a fiscal note. What would it say? Without any affected employees yet hired how would you quantify the dollar savings of that ordinance other than by saying it’ll reduce costs by 25%. The day an employee is hired, and with adequate assumptions regarding retirement and life expectancy you can begin to put a dollar amount to that percentage savings. Until then it’s its just 25%. And continually shouting “whats the 100%?” doesn’t make that any less true.

The argument against the OPEB trust essentially boils down to “the actuary is full of S#@!” If you want to disagree with the actuary’s study that’s fine I guess but I would hesitate to be so certain. I’m pretty sure the actuary did more than plug some numbers into a spreadsheet.

As for my calling into question Mr. Cushman’s numbers, it’s not that I or he could calculate the numbers and the city couldn’t, its that we added an assumption, namely, that an employee was hired in 2020. Then, with a hypothetical start date, we could project out a 30 year career, with a 25 year retirement and, based on the provided assumptions, create a profile for ONE hypothetical employee. Again, I believe Mr. Cushman’s numbers, for ONE hypothetical employee assumed hired in 2020, were wrong based on a faulty starting point in regards to medicare supplement plans but that’s irrelevant to the larger point.