Warwick Mayor Scott Avedisian took to the pages of the Projo today to talk up his pension reform proposal and remind everyone that most of the pension system’s problems were baked into the cake decades ago:

It took in excess of 50 years for the original police and fire pensions to get to the point where they are currently, and there is more than enough responsibility to go around for not dealing with the issue as it has developed. However, we must continue to look forward. The pension reform legislation is a good place to start to ensure that the mistakes of the past do not continue into the future.

The problem for Avedisian and other well-meaning mayors is that, even as they look forward, they still need to look backwards and figure out how to deal with the fiscal sins of the past.

Warwick is, in fact, a perfect example. As Avedisian rightly points out, previous administrations in Warwick (including Lincoln Chafee’s) managed to stop the bleeding by creating new pension systems to replace the city’s unfunded pre-1971 police and fire plan.

When you add together Warwick’s five separate city pension plans, they are about 59% funded, with $330 million in assets to cover $555 million in liabilities. That’s almost the same ratio as Rhode Island’s state pension system.

This chart, though, shows just how much the old pre-1971 plan’s liabilities dwarf those of the healthier new ones:

The question, then, is what Warwick is going to do about the $200 million gap between its pre-1971 plan’s assets and liabilities. It’s plans like those which the Rhode Island League of Cities and Towns’ Dan Beardsley suggested to me the other day could be the source of litigation as cities unable to fund them move to take away benefits promised in the past.

Avedisian, for his part, was largely silent this morning about the pre-1971 plan (emphasis mine):

Overall, the city’s pension plans are in better shape than those of many other municipal or state systems. Nevertheless, in Warwick, the biggest unresolved issue are the original police and fire pension plans. Today, they are funded at only 27 percent of what is needed. So, while people can suggest that the city has failed to do what is right, they instead should be asking the original creators of the pension systems why there was no leadership when the plans were created. Had even a small amount been contributed annually in those years, the unfunded liability today would be very small.

Well, sure – I suppose we could call up Raymond Stone or Horace Hobbs to ask why they failed to make pension contributions in the ’50s and ’60s. (Actually, we can’t; Hobbs died in 1999, Stone in 2004.) But that’s not going to yield a solution to Warwick’s $200 million pension gap.

Avedisian and his fellow mayors may have inherited this problem – but it’s still theirs now.

More: Warwick’s 40-year plan to fund its pension system (Feb. 22)