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Biden administration moves to protect Alaska wilderness; opening statements and first witness in NY trial; SCOTUS hears Starbucks case, with implications for unions on the line; rural North Carolina town gets pathway to home ownership.

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The Supreme Court weighs cities ability to manage a growing homelessness crisis, anti-Israeli protests spread to college campuses nationwide, and more states consider legislation to ban firearms at voting sites and ballot drop boxes.

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Wyoming needs more educators who can teach kids trade skills, a proposal to open 40-thousand acres of an Ohio forest to fracking has environmental advocates alarmed and rural communities lure bicyclists with state-of-the-art bike trail systems.

Washington Supreme Court Ruling Leaves State Retirees Scrambling

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Tuesday, August 19, 2014   

OLYMPIA, Wash. - The Washington state Supreme Court ruled last week that the Legislature can eliminate cost-of-living adjustments to the pension checks of retired state workers.

The Retired Public Employees Council of Washington has said no one is getting rich living on a state pension, which averages less than $2,000 a month.

Jean Kelly would agree. She retired from the Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) in 2000, after 31 years of service to the Evergreen State. Kelly says she has counted on the possibility of a cost-of-living increase, as her budget gets a little tighter every year.

"We all looked at it as a way of keeping up with inflation," she says. "We felt pretty secure that we had that flexibility, but we lost all of that flexibility, entirely. So, really, it's kind of a desperate feeling now, because we had the hope before."

The Legislature discontinued cost-of-living increases in 2011, prompting the lawsuit by state workers and retirees that ended with the Supreme Court's decision. Kelly says retirees will now look to legislators to reinstate some of their benefits.

The court also ruled the state doesn't have to pay retirees what is known as "gain-sharing" or extra benefits when the retirement fund does exceptionally well.

David Jolly, who is 89 and worked 30 years for county and state transportation departments, describes his standard of living today as "about half" what it was when he retired in 1982. He thinks the state is handling its workers' successful pension plans much as Congress has handled Social Security.

"We have built up funds handled by people that know how to invest properly to get good returns," he says. "Then the state government borrows from that investment package. It goes down, and so they then say they're going broke."

State lawmakers have been debating the idea of shifting new state workers from a traditional, defined-benefit pension plan to a 401K plan, which the Washington Federation of State Employees has called "risky, unstable and unpredictable." Jolly says chipping away at retirees' security will only make it harder to attract people to state jobs in the future.



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