Robert Shawver

I am a retired State employee (RIDOT), and my wife Diane is a retired schoolteacher in the State retirement system. I retired in December 2015 after over 25 years of service. Since that time, I have received one .42% cost-of-living increase to my pension in January 2022. Inflation has been 30% since my retirement. Diane started collecting her retirement in Oct 2016. She has received one cost-of-living increase in October 2021 of 1.0%. Since Oct 2016, inflation has been 27%. Basically, my family’s pension income has lost 30% of its value since retirement. Each year we are only going to lose more as inflation gets higher and higher.

State retirees lost the cost-of-living increase promised to them by the State when the State's finances were in a dire crisis. Now that the State has large financial surpluses, the State should provide relief to retirees in the form of an annual cost-of-living increase. I suggest an annual increase based on a percentage of the social security COLA increase. This takes the politics out of the COLA determination and shouldn’t be a financial burden on the pension fund since the State Treasurer should be able to manage Pension assets to yield more than the annual inflation rate.

I hope you seriously consider the effects of the COLA loss on retirees in your deliberations. Thank you for your consideration.

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