Scott Beyer’s Market Urbanism Report looks at Baltimore up close

Scott Beyer’s Market Urbanism Report has an active presence on Facebook and has just used it to devote a month’s worth of attention to the problems, challenges, and quirks of Baltimore, from policing good and bad to Formstone to the money-sink Hilton project to eminent domain to housing abandonment to the upkeep of public spaces. Check out the whole group as well as its associated website for a treasure trove of analysis and information about city and development issues, informed by market reasoning.

Maryland’s (and its counties’) unfunded pension obligations

As Carol Park notes in this Maryland Reporter write-up, the Maryland Public Policy Institute has published a report and interactive map by which Maryland residents can check the funding status of county public employees in their counties. There is a wide spread between how well funded the counties are, with five in the healthy situation of being 90 percent or more funded (Montgomery, Frederick, Charles, Calvert, Cecil), and at the other end ten counties in the less enviable position of being less than 70 percent funded, including Baltimore City and County and Prince George’s as well as many rural counties.

Meanwhile, the state legislators’ group ALEC has published Unaffordable and Unaccountable 2017, which

surveys the more than 280 state-administered public pension plans, detailing their assets and liabilities. The unfunded liabilities (the amount by which the present value of liabilities exceeds current assets) are reported using the investment return assumptions used by states, along with alternative measures more consistent with prudent risk management and more reasonable long-term market performance expectations. This report clearly illuminates the pervasive pension underfunding across the nation and details the assumptions and trends contributing to this crisis.

Maryland is around the middle of the pack among the 50 states, which is not good enough. It did improve its ranking slightly from 27th best to 23rd best state between 2016 and 1017, but the absolute amount of unfunded liabilities per capita in Maryland actually rose, from $15,570 to $16,481. And its funding ratio sank from 33.1% to 32.5%, this at a time of economic recovery. Wisconsin is the most strongly funded state and Connecticut the worst. The report, by Thurston Powers, Elliot Young, Bob Williams and Erica York, is here.