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

Among differences expressed by village board president candidates Anan Abu-Taleb and John Hedges at the March 1 forum at the Carleton Hotel was to what extent villagers are keyed into village-government matters.

Very little, says Abu-Taleb, who speaks of “disengagement of citizens from the governing process” as a major issue and wants to “bring people to the table.” (He’s a restaurateur, is he not?) He would be “a face for Oak Park,” engaging citizens in various ways, including in a monthly “open forum.”

To this Hedges played the (strong) commission card, in fact 26 of them, consisting of volunteers in many areas of public interest including issues to be voted on by trustees. They are almost all advisory — zoning has its own authority, to name one — and turn up periodically on board agenda, where they have their say as privileged sitters at a figurative board table, whether ignored…

At the March 1 forum at the Carleton Hotel, village board presidential candidate Anan Abu-Taleb dropped info about Oak Park’s finances that deserved a response from candidate John Hedges. But the response was weak.

The village is $100 million in debt, said Abu-Taleb, and has a meager 58% funded of its $126 million in pension obligations, including fire and police pensions, whose shortfall last year rose from $105 million to $106 million.

Pension funds had negative balances in seven of the last 11 years, for what he called a structural deficit. Village staff tells him the village is planning on its funds earning an unrealistic 8% annually, he said.

Hedges, who has been a village trustee since 2007, implicitly conceded the accuracy of the figures, which are backed up aggressively by a Better Government Assn. report, but surprisingly dismissed them. “The big issue is the property tax,” he said…