Forest Park’s fire department’s underfunded pensions are putting the future of local firefighters at risk, officials said.
The pension’s lack of funding not only affects working firefighters looking to retire soon, it also affects the new class of incoming firefighters looking for work.
“The incentive to attract new young recruits is going to not be nearly as pronounced if you’re looking at a pension fund that isn’t well funded, and then you can go to a different municipality and see that it’s much more healthy,” Laura Goodloe, the pension board’s attorney said at a meeting earlier this month.
Travis Myers, firefighter for Forest Park and president of the firefighter pension board said current employees feel the toll, too.
Last year, Forest Park’s fire department started taking ambulance calls, increasing their calls from roughly 3,800 calls a year to 4342 calls a year according to Myers.
“Back in the day, a lot of guys would work for 30 years. Now, guys my age, I’m 45, can only work like 25 years in this, especially in Forest Park, because our call volume is wild. There’s times when we’ll run 26 to 27 calls a day,” Myers told Forest Park Review.
This high call volume not only stresses firefighters and pushes them toward retirement, it also allows for more injuries to take place on site, a cost that would negatively affect the pension fund.
“You’re adding a lot of risk to the pension system. The longer they work and the more calls they have, it’s pretty easy to assume that they’re probably more likely to be injured on the job,” Myers said. Forest Park would have to pay the medical bills from that injury for the rest of the firefighters life, leading to less money for the pension fund.
“We can’t get people to take these jobs anymore,” Myers said. “Schaumburg may have like 500 to 600 people coming in to take the test to qualify as a firefighter candidate. And then when I came and took the test in Forest Park, I think there were maybe 75 people.”
Myers said that there is now only one person on the hiring list for the Forest Park Fire Department who passed all the necessary tests.
This issue also affects the quality of the care the department can provide, with the department having less candidates to choose from, possibly leading to a lower quality of firefighters.
“For public safety workers, pensions are a big reason why a lot of us get into this. I mean, you get into it for the job and all that. But as far as what we get out of it, our pensions are the most important part of our benefits,” Myers said. “I’ve been worried about this coming wave of retirements for a long time. “
The Forest Park Review reported that over the last several years, the village’s general fund has been reduced to meet minimum contribution requirements for pensions. If pensions are not fully funded by 2040, the pension funds can intercept state-shared revenues to meet the minimum requirement.
The goal is to have the pensions funded up to 90% by 2040, a quota set by state statute. The pensions are currently about 35% funded, according to reporting by Forest Park Review. Forest Park’s police department faces similar issues.
Myers said he is hoping that pension reform can make the job look more attractive to younger candidates, but that pension reform is not based on him, it’s based on how much the village funds it.
Forest Park has put in action to try to increase the pension fund, including introducing dispensaries and other taxed businesses to the area.
“I know there’s gonna be some allotted tax revenue from there that they’re gonna put into the pension,” Forest Park firefighter William Toth said at a pension board meeting this month.
“The village has done a better job than I’d ever seen it do, as far as recruiting new business,” Myers said. “I have faith in the mayor and the administration there that they can appropriately fund us.”
Correction, Sept. 10, 11:51 a.m. This article has been updated with the correct number of calls the fire department responded to last year, a result of incorrect information supplied to the reporter. We apologize for the error.
