PERA Bonuses Expose Colorado’s Pension Betrayal

The Colorado Sun published a gut-punch investigation into Colorado PERA, the public pension system that teachers, troopers, snowplow drivers, clerks, local government workers, and retirees depend on after lifetimes of public work. The headline finding is exactly the kind of Denver money magic that makes normal people reach for the antacids: as retiree pensions shrank, PERA paid its staff millions in bonuses.

According to The Sun’s analysis, nearly half of PERA’s investment staff doubled their salaries through incentives, even as retirees lost ground to inflation and the system kept preaching sacrifice, sustainability, and long-term discipline to everyone else. The article reports that PERA lost $9.8 billion in 2022, its worst year since the Great Recession, yet investment staff later averaged bonuses of $299,000, adding 124% on top of their salaries.

The Bullet Point Brief

• PERA’s investment staff found the one inflation hedge retirees apparently were not offered: giant incentive checks. The Sun reports that average bonuses rose from $187,000 in 2020 to $294,000 last year. Nice work, if you can explain it with enough actuarial fog.
• The system says it needs these bonuses to attract and retain “talent.” Funny how market competitiveness becomes sacred scripture when Denver finance staff want a bigger check, but becomes a sad violin solo when retirees are watching groceries, property taxes, insurance, and rent eat their fixed income.
• Retirees have been told to absorb smaller cost-of-living increases, higher pressure on the system, and the gospel of “shared sacrifice.” Apparently the sharing stopped at the lobby of PERA headquarters in Capitol Hill.
• The Sun reports that 18 of 38 people who managed PERA investments since 2020 doubled their salaries through incentives, and eight more earned bonuses equal to 90% of base pay. That is not public service. That is Wall Street cosplay with a government badge.
• The real Colorado scam is not that public workers have pensions. They earned them. The scam is that the people managing the promise get paid like heroes while the people depending on the promise get treated like a rounding error.

My Bottom Line

Let’s be clear before the professional misreaders start warming up their little outrage engines: this is not an attack on teachers, snowplow drivers, troopers, county clerks, state workers, local government employees, or retirees. Those folks did the work. They made plans around promises. They paid in. They trusted the system. This is about the people managing that system, the board overseeing it, and the lawmakers who treat PERA like some sacred actuarial fog machine nobody in the cheap seats is allowed to question.

The emotional center here is betrayal. PERA is supposed to protect retirement security. When the fund is under pressure, leadership talks about sacrifice, sustainability, contribution rates, long-term assumptions, and responsibility. Retirees are expected to smile through shrinking buying power like it is a civic virtue. Workers are expected to kick in. Taxpayers are expected to keep the machine upright. But when staff compensation comes up, suddenly everybody at headquarters turns into a hedge fund recruiter in a Patagonia vest.

Colorado’s public pension managers found a way to socialize sacrifice and privatize the bonus checks. That is the whole trick. Losses are everyone’s problem. Pain is shared. The belt gets tightened across classrooms, road crews, offices, patrol cars, and kitchen tables. But the bonus pool? That gets explained as an “incentive,” wrapped in consultant jargon, and passed around like dessert at a finance conference.

And where are the lawmakers? Mostly hiding behind complexity. PERA is complicated, yes. So is a combine engine, but that does not mean you let the mechanic bill you for champagne and call it “retention.” The Colorado Legislature has been perfectly capable of telling retirees and workers to accept less in the name of saving the system. It should be equally capable of telling PERA leadership that public trust does not come with a six-figure bonus culture stapled to it.

This is not stewardship. It is government-by-expense-account bullshit. And the people who built their retirements around Colorado’s promises deserve better than being lectured about sacrifice by a system that somehow always finds money for the people running the machine.

Source: The Colorado Sun