Does Oak Park have a pension problem, as candidate Anan Abu-Taleb said in the March 1 Carleton Hotel forum, saying the village should go to the police and fire fighters and negotiate more of their contract offer money to their funds?

Chicago’s mayor did that with the city’s police sergeants and got nowhere, as Fran Spielman reports in today’s Sun-Times.

By a nearly 7-1 ratio, sergeants rejected a deal that would have given them a 9 percent pay raise over four years in exchange for: raising the retirement age for sergeants to 53; increasing employee pension contributions from 9 to 12 percent by January, 2015; hiking health care contributions for new retirees to 2 percent of annuities; forfeiting cost-of-living adjustments every other year and limited COLA in intervening years to 2.5 percent with simple interest.

What candidate Anan had in mind, I presume, was increasing employee pension contributions