By:  Diane Benjamin

I emailed with the reporter of the Chicago Tribune story today.  Without him, you never would have known the City was allowing you to be ripped off.

Joe Mahr gave me a little more history of spiking.  The law disallowing employees to spike their salary in the final 3 months of employment goes clear back to 1963.  He said employees have been working around the law ever since to get their pensions up.  The 2012 law finally set a threshold allowing IMRF to collect from local government, thus sharing the cost of increased pensions that nobody had paid for.

Here are a few visuals from openthebooks.com .   It’s easy to see why the retirement fund had to collect more to cover future pension expenses: