MIDLAND Advocating for the Texas Legislature to give retired teachers a cost of living increase and using the rainy day fund to do it was one of the main features of a presentation by Texas Retired Teachers Association Executive Director Tim Lee during remarks Thursday.
Lee spoke at a meeting of the Midland Association of Retired School Personnel at First Baptist Church in Midland. Teachers from across the region attended.
The Teacher Retirement System in Texas is over $200 billion in total value.
“The state of Texas budget has $27 billion in extra revenue. Retired teachers in Texas, over half of them have never had a raise. Ninety-five percent of them have no Social Security. What Social Security they do have is unfairly attacked by the federal government and those benefits are in a dramatic way,” Lee said.
“The only help that we see on the horizon starts in January and ends in June and it’s the Texas Legislature and they’ve got millions of extra dollars. We need help. One out of every 16 Texans is a member of the Teacher Retirement System …,” he added.
This affects communities big time.
“Nine billion of the Texas economy … is because retired teachers receive a monthly annuity paycheck and spend those dollars in the community and we’ve all been paying higher fees and higher taxes, which is a portion of that $27 billion …,” Lee said.
He added that he fears the retired teachers more than the legislature.
“And I pray they don’t let the moment pass because if they do, I would fear you far more than I would fear something else,” Lee said.
There are 450,000 current retirees in the Teacher Retirement System. Lee said 150,000 of them have an annuity that’s $1,500 a month or less. Of that group, 131,000 make $1,000 a month or less.
“When you’re looking at the total picture of what’s going on with our TRS, the average annuity is just a little over $2,000 a month … A major portion of our current retiree population is being asked to live on $1,000 a month or less. I’m not sure how much Social Security they may or may not be getting; probably not very much,” Lee said.
He added that a number of people are asking for a helping hand donation because they can’t afford dental work or to get their car fixed.
“Those are items that are going up for us and we’re trying to continue to support and so these are realities that you all know,” Lee said.
He added that the preferred method for helping retired school employees in Texas has always been to provide a base increase in their retirement benefits through a cost of living raise.
“It is recent history that we have focused on the supplemental payments and I don’t want anybody to walk out of this room thinking that I am downplaying what we’ve been able to achieve through our supplement checks. Because they have cost hundreds of millions of dollars and to the great credit of our friends in the Texas Legislature, we’ve had three supplemental checks. Two of them have come within the last four years in two legislative sessions, back to back, which cost more than a billion and a half dollars in total money not coming out of our trust fund, but coming out of the state coffers to pay for it. It didn’t affect our state trust, so that is great public policy. Last session, the Texas legislature could have authorized a raise. We wish that they would have because inflation hit really hard. We all know it. We know it because if we look at just the numbers, if you retired in 2004, $1 in 2004 in today’s money because of inflation is worth about 64 cents. That is what we’re dealing with,” Lee said.
He added that they need a restoration of their buying power so they can afford “stuff.”
