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Police Officers' and Firefighters' Pension Board September 13, 2001 Page 5 VERBATIM TRANSCRIPT Schluckebier: At the previous meeting the Board requested an actuarial review of the items that Scott had put into the ordinance for consideration to change but for different reasons I would like to the Board to give consideration to waiting to adopt these to let us review their impact and the entire policy that the City has had about parity with the Florida Retirement System. The reason that we moved into our own retirement system was that the issue of were we going always going to go lock step with the State of Florida and be responsible to pay for everything that they thought was a good idea instead to be able to address that locally. I am convinced that just going lock step with the State is not necessarily a good idea. I am also convinced that when we made the change we made the change to our own system we have honored that pledge that making the change would seamless in other words we offered the same benefits in the change that we adopted that was adopted by the pension board by the City, the same benefits were extended to the extent of allowed by the use of the English language and intended to be parity but that same issue does not necessarily hold for the future. And so just because somebody goes to Tallahassee and says we thinks this would be a good thing for all State employees and everybody covered by the Florida Retirement System to do xyz does not necessarily mean that we need to do that locally automatically. Particularly once you look at the next item which is the actuarial study of costing that which hadn't been done at the previous meeting when Scott was bringing these along. I am more convinced now than I was before once you look at the price tag that you ought to carefully consider these kind of changes. We have I think about thirty people maybe thirty- five covered by police and fire actuarial stuff to consider from these changes alone besides about twenty thousand or twenty three similar around about seven or eight hundred dollars a person per year and what Scott was saying is well you get rebate money and so there is no net cost to the City but that really isn't the point. That is sort of like saying if you are getting grant you should do whatever it is that you can do with a grant and that is not always the point either. It is still government money, it is still tax money and I think the Board owns it to itself to think carefully about what it wants to do on these kind of changes and not just go lock step. I would be prepared to bring back a set of recommendations for you to look at for the next meeting. If someone were to ask me right now should the board do this, I would say definitely not, just for the reasons I have described but I think by the next meeting it is possible that about half of the things that the State is considering make a lot of sense, but just to say we need to do this because someone in