Boom boom boom boom...
And I continue to beat this drum.
So, a day after Mark McDonald enlightens tens of thousands of Philadelphians about a crisis that threatens to suck up a huge chunk of their tax dollar before that dollar is ever put to fixing the streets or picking up the trash, City Council, in its infinite wisdom, decides to (surprise!) do the politically expedient thing.
Imagine you're McDonald. One day, you're working on a story about how Philadelphia's city worker pension fund assets only cover about half of its expected liabilities and the next day, you're writing about how City Council decides to override a mayoral veto to give pensioners more money from that fund. Reporters in this town must begin to feel like they're Nurse Ratched writing a newsletter about the comings and goings of Randle Patrick McMurphy and Billy Bibbit.
Lest you think that the situation is hopeless or that this is a uniquely Philadelphia problem, you should know that municipal and state governments are facing the came problems all over the country. Management Insights, a weekly column published in collaboration with the Government Innovators Network at Harvard’s Kennedy Schoolof Government devoted it's latest edition to the challenge faced by public sector in attracting a retaining top talent. Choosing a career in public service, specifically in government, often meant giving up the opportunity to earn higher wages for similar work in the private sector but receiving a top-of-the-line benefits package in return.
Well, the time has come for the government employers to pay the piper. As their baby-boomer employees reach retirement age, they'll be cashing in on those pensions. According to the column, municipal and state governments will face a number of challenges:
How will we create and sustain high-performance organizations that can attract and retain top talent and produce results that matter most to citizens? How will we finance the pensions of the current workforce? How do we deal with health care for the large baby-boom generation of public employees? Are the current approaches to wages and benefits financially sustainable and attractive to a new generation of workers?
The answer: get a bunch of really smart, or "smaht" (this is a publication from Harvard, afterall), people together to solve the problem:
Enter the Center for State and Local Government Excellence. The center will focus on research in the areas of public-sector retirement and retiree health savings security.
...
Partnering with leading universities and researchers working in the areas of pensions and retiree health care, the center will produce studies on the impact of demographic trends on employers in state and local governments and document leading practices to shorten the learning curve for employers. In addition, the center will develop — and advocate for — best-practice approaches to compensation, health care, retirement, and other benefits.
So maybe there's hope. I'm sure we have just as many smart people, in government and otherwise, who can come together to solve this problem. It'll be up to the next mayor to bring them together and if he does he'll get 
from me.