Having renegotiated its debt with most creditors, cobbled together layoffs and service cuts and raised the sales tax to 9 percent from 8.25 percent, Stockton, Calif., is nearly ready to leave court protection, but the city has not addressed the issue of its skyrocketing public pensions, the New York Times reported today. “No city wants to take on the state pension system by itself,” said Stockton’s new mayor, Anthony Silva, referring to the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, or Calpers. “Every city thinks some other city will take care of it.” While a federal bankruptcy judge ruled this week that Detroit could possibly reduce public pensions to help shed its debts, Stockton has become an experiment of whether a municipality can successfully come out of bankruptcy and stabilize its finances without touching pensions. It is an effort that has come at great cost to city services and one that some critics say will simply not work once the city starts trying to restore services and hire 120 police officers it promised to get the sales-tax increase passed. “They wanted to get out of bankruptcy in the worst possible way, and that’s just what they did,” said Dean Andal of the San Joaquin County Taxpayers Association, which fought the sales-tax increase. “If they go ahead and hire those new police officers, the city will be back in insolvency in four years.”
