public finance

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City Revenues Expected to Finally Recover From Recession

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But cities are still dealing with slow revenue growth and rising costs, according to a new report.

BY  | OCTOBER 14, 2016

 

City revenues have struggled to get back to pre-recession levels. But things may finally be looking up.

On Thursday, officials announced that they expect city incomes to fully recover by next year -- a decade after the start of the Great Recession.

It’s by far the longest revenue recovery period in more than a generation as the bounce back period after the previous two recessions was done in half the amount of time. Currently, officials estimate that city revenues (accounting for inflation) have reached 96 percent of what they were in 2006, the year before the recession started.

Even with Stock Market's Rise, Many Pensions Haven't Recovered from Recession

BY  | DECEMBER 17, 2014

This fall, Jim Carroll appeared before the Kentucky legislature's Public Pension Oversight Board and testified about the state of the nation’s worst-funded retirement plan. Over the last three years, said the co-founder of Kentucky Government Retirees, the Kentucky Employees Retirement System has exceeded its assumed rate of return -- yet it lost more than half a billion dollars in that time.

In fact, the plan has been in a virtual freefall for years. At the end of the 2013 fiscal year, the plan had $3.3 billion in net assets -- that's roughly half of its peak value just before the Great Recession. The gap makes it the pension system that has the farthest to go to recover the assets it lost in the stock market crash, according to a Governing analysis of 146 larger pension plans across the country.