"New government employees, not public safety employees but new government employees beyond the public-safety realm, are going to have to come on under a different deal," Whitman said at a campaign event earlier this year. "They're going to have to come in under a 401(k) program, what we call a defined contribution program, as opposed to a defined benefit program, and this will get us a long way home towards reducing this huge unfunded pension liability.

This doesn’t remove the pensions, this simply says if the money’s not there the benefits have to be trimmed to make the system healthy. And employees were never promised” cost of living increases, Kavanagh said. But, “if the world was to flip into a recession, and we went into a depression, surely members don’t think that life will go merrily along in the public pension realm.”

House Minority Leader Chad Campbell said Tuesday there are funding problems wi

not qualify for Social Security, leaving them to rely exclusively on their pension check. Public safety workers hired before 1986 also don’t qualify for Medicare, meaning they must pay at least $7,000 annually for health insurance.

e of the reasons Arizona's pension trusts are in better shape than those in some other states is because their protection was mandated in a public vote 12 years ago. That vote may be coming back to haunt Arizona taxpayers, as it forces them to pay a growing share of the cost for those guaranteed benefits.