Cries of Betrayal as Detroit Plans to Cut Pensions

Stephen McGee for The New York TimesGloria Killebrew, 73, a retiree who cares for her husband, J. D., in Dearborn, Mich. More Photos »

DETROIT — Gloria Killebrew, 73, worked for the City of Detroit for 22 years and now spends her days caring for her husband, J. D., who has had three heart attacks and multiple kidney operations, the last of which left him needing dialysis three times a week at the Henry Ford Medical Center in Dearborn, Mich.

Isaiah McKinnon, a retired police chief, expressed concern about officers whose pensions were based on lower salaries. More Photos »

Now there is a new worry: Detroit wants to cut the pensions it pays retirees like Ms. Killebrew, who now receives about $1,900 a month.

“It’s been life on a roller coaster,” Ms. Killebrew said, explaining that even if she could find a new job at her age, there would be no one to take care of her husband. “You don’t sleep well. You think about whether you’re going to be able to make it. Right now, you don’t really know.”

Detroit’s pension shortfall accounts for about $3.5 billion of the $18 billion in debts that led the city to file for bankruptcy last week. How it handles this problem — of not enough money set aside to pay the pensions it has promised its workers — is being closely watched by other cities with fiscal troubles.

Kevyn D. Orr, the city’s emergency manager, has called for “significant cuts” to the pensions of current retirees. His plan is being fought vigorously by unions that point out that pensions are protected by Michigan’s Constitution, which calls them a contractual obligation that “shall not be diminished or impaired.”

Gov. Rick Snyder of Michigan, a Republican who appointed Mr. Orr, signed off on the bankruptcy strategy for the once-mighty city, which has seen its tax base and services erode sharply in recent years. But the governor said he worried about Detroit’s 21,000 municipal retirees.

“You’ve got to have great empathy for them,” Mr. Snyder said in an interview. “These are hard-working people that are in retirement now — they’re on fixed incomes, most of them — and you look at this and say, ‘This is a very difficult situation.’ ”

On Sunday, Mr. Snyder fended off the notion that the city needed a federal bailout. “It’s not about just putting more money in a situation,” the governor said on “Face the Nation” on CBS. “It’s about better services to citizens again. It’s about accountable government.”

Many retirees see the plan to cut their pensions as a betrayal, saying that they kept their end of a deal but that the city is now reneging. Retired city workers, police officers and 911 operators said in interviews that the promise of reliable retirement income had helped draw them to work for the City of Detroit in the first place, even if they sometimes had to accept smaller salaries or work nights or weekends.

“Does Detroit have a problem?” asked William Shine, 76, a retired police sergeant. “Absolutely. Did I create it? I don’t think so. They made me some promises, and I made them some promises. I kept my promises. They’re not going to keep theirs.”

Vera Proctor, 63, who retired in 2010 after 39 years as a 911 operator and supervisor, said she worried that at her age and with her poor health, it would be difficult to find a new job to make up for any reductions to her pension payments.

“Where’s the nearest street corner where I can sell bottles of water?” Ms. Proctor asked wryly. “That’s what it’s going to come down to. We’re not going to have anything.”

Officials overseeing Detroit’s finances have called for reducing — not eliminating — pension payments to retirees, but have not said how big those reductions might be. They emphasized that they were trying to spread the pain of bankruptcy evenly.

When the small city of Central Falls, R.I., declared bankruptcy in 2011, a state law gave bondholders preferential treatment — effectively protecting investors even as the city’s retirees saw their pension benefits slashed by up to 55 percent in some cases.

Detroit, by contrast, wants to spread the losses to investors as well as pensioners, and hopes to find cheaper ways to cover retirees through the subsidized health exchanges being created by President Obama’s health care law.

Bill Nowling, a spokesman for Mr. Orr, said the emergency manager’s restructuring plan would treat bondholders the same as retirees in bankruptcy.

Steven Yaccino reported from Detroit, and Michael Cooper from New York. Erica Goode and Monica Davey contributed reporting from Detroit, and Mary Williams Walsh from New York.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 22, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the institution where Isaiah McKinnon, who was Detroit’s police chief in the 1990s, works as an associate professor. It is the University of Detroit Mercy, not Detroit Mercy University.

Putin Puts Pensions at Risk in $43 Billion Bid to Jolt Economy

Mr. Putin’s proposal to dip into the country’s pension reserves for loans of up to $43.5 billion for three big infrastructure projects provoked an immediate debate among some of Russia’s top financial minds. It also brought warnings from financial experts who said that it might produce a burst of inflation, and that what the Russian economy needed most was deep structural change, to diversify from oil and gas and to build investor confidence.

Mr. Putin, now in his 13th year as Russia’s political leader, made the stimulus plan the centerpiece of his speech at an annual economic forum here that serves as a gathering of the country’s top financial officials, business leaders and foreign investors. Slowing growth has been the obsessive topic this year.

In his speech, Mr. Putin said Russia would distribute the reserves as loans to modernize the storied Trans-Siberian Railway, which runs between Moscow and Vladivostok in the Far East; to construct a 500-mile high-speed rail line between Moscow and Kazan, the capital of the Tatarstan region; and to build a superhighway ringing Moscow.

“Our key challenge in the coming years is to remove many infrastructure constraints that literally stifle our country and prevent unlocking the potential of entire regions,” Mr. Putin said. “Investors are hugely interested in infrastructure projects, especially if the state is ready to provide guarantees, minimize the risks and act as a co-investor.”

The Russian economy has been strong in recent years, functioning almost at full capacity, largely because of high energy prices, which helped build up the country’s reserve funds. But with nearly full employment, new government spending is more likely to cause wage inflation than to create new jobs, experts say. Instead, they add, Russia needs to review manufacturing, create new industries and attract foreign capital.

While not the headline measure in Mr. Putin’s plan, the amnesty proposal was by far the most surprising item. It was the brainchild of Mr. Putin’s business ombudsman, Boris Titov, who has championed it as a means to improve the business climate.

“The period that just passed was not the best for defenders of property rights,” Mr. Titov said last week in an interview.

In 2000, when Mr. Putin came to power, the government re-examined many of the early post-Soviet privatizations, which were widely regarded as fraudulent, and later imprisoned the richest man in Russia at the time, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, on charges of tax evasion and fraud that many critics said were trumped up.

Taking a cue, police and Federal Security Service officers set about seizing businesses large and small throughout Russia from unpopular or unlucky businessmen, and often, in an Orwellian manner, emerging as the owners themselves.

In fact, police officers who seize businesses are common enough in Russia to have earned the nickname “werewolves in epaulets.”

The intention of the amnesty plan is to free thousands of run-of-the-mill businessmen caught up in this turmoil, while avoiding the high-profile and politically tinged cases, like those of Mr. Khodorkovsky, who is not expected to be freed.

Mr. Titov said that 110,000 people were serving prison time for economic crimes, and that 2,500 others were in pretrial detention. The draft of the amnesty bill, Mr. Titov said, covers 13,000 of them.

“This initiative will on the whole strengthen the trust of citizens” in the business community, Mr. Putin said in his speech. “I am certain the development of the state is possible only under conditions of respect for private property, to the values of economic freedom and the work and success of entrepreneurs.”

More broadly, though, the intention of Mr. Putin’s amnesty, Mr. Titov said, is to signal to the business community an easing police pressure. It is, he said, “a very positive, a very good signal for Russia, and that is important as in Russia. We don’t often have good signals.”