Member of Center’s Task Force to be Panelist at Brown Univ “Pensions in Peril” Forum

Providence — A member of the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity’s special pension task force will serve as a panelist at the “Pensions in Peril” forum today, October 25 (Thursday afternoon), sponsored by the Taubman Center for Public Policy at Brown University. The forum will feature national and local experts about how municipalities are dealing with the fiscal time bomb of unfunded pension liabilities.

Eileen Norcross, a senior research fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and lead researcher on the State and Local Policy Project, was the first national expert to raise alarms about public pension accounting in RI localities in 2011, arguing that municipalities are vastly under-estimating the true scope of their unfunded pension liabilities. Norcross co-authored a report that calculated municipal pension liabilities under various discount rate assumptions.

The Mercatus Center report, which received significant local and national attention, indirectly challenges the more rosy pension assumptions put forth by some local officials in RI, including co-panelist, Mayor Scott Avedisian of Warwick.

The forum, which will take place from 4:00 pm to 6:00 pm at the Salomon Center for Teaching 001 off the main green at Brown University, is free and open to the public and media.

For more information about the Center’s pension task force and Eileen Norcross, click here.

The Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity, a non-partisan public policy think tank, is the state’s leading free-enterprise advocacy organization. With a credo that freedom is indispensable to citizens’ well-being and prosperity, the Center’s mission is to stimulate a rigorous exchange of ideas with the goal of restoring competitiveness to Rhode Island through the advancement of market-based reform solutions.

Media Contact:

Taubman Center: 401.863.2201