Chicago will pay at least $902 million in 2017 to its four retirement funds that are only 23 percent funded, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The shortfall across the four funds ballooned to $33.8 billion from $20 billion a year earlier, mostly due to new accounting rules. Chicago hasn't paid enough into its retirement funds for years, leaving the city of 2.7 million strapped with hundreds of millions of dollars of obligations and the lowest credit rating of any big U.S. city except Detroit. Officials have been spending more than they're bringing in, and borrowing to push off debt payments, a practice Mayor Rahm Emanuel has promised to end by 2019. Long-term debt-service payments in 2017 are currently projected at about $2 billion.
