“Jeri Shanahan died. The state won” by Fred Klonsky

This wasn’t another case of coronavirus taking the life of an older person with underlying medical issues. As far as I know, Jeri was in good health and passed suddenly from a heart attack on March 11 at the age of 77.

Jeri and I got to know each other from telephone calls she would make to me over the past decade. On February 11, I received my last call from Jeri Shanahan.

I’ve written about Jeri a few times over these past years. So did my pension blogging comrade Glen Brown. Phil Kadner wrote a couple of pieces in the Daily Southtown about Jeri. So did the Chicago Tribune.

Jeri Shanahan’s short obituary ran the other day in the Chicago Trib:

Geraldine (“Jeri”) Shanahan, 77, of Orland Park, daughter of the late Geraldine M. and the late John E. Shanahan Jr., died suddenly at home March 11 of coronary disease. Jeri taught in both the Catholic and public school systems for a total of 39 years. She also served as religious education coordinator at St. Damian Parish in Oak Forest. She will be remembered by her family and by many close friends. Interment at Mount Olivet cemetery was private; a Memorial Mass will be celebrated at St. John Fisher Church at a future date.

Why did Jeri and I strike up a relationship. She was like a dog on a bone when it came to pension justice. How could I not like her?

She had been cheated by the state of Illinois and by its politicians with the agreement of our teacher union leaders and the organizations that she had expected to stand by her. None had. None of them. Not one. But she pestered the crap out of them and annoyed them to no end. Even her friends sometimes got tired of hearing about it. Sometimes even me.

Jeri figured the state stole over $100,000 in pension health care benefits from her since she retired from teaching children in Community Consolidated School District 146, which serves Tinley Park, Oak Forest and Orland Park.

Jeri was one of about 600 teachers who were Medicare ineligible because they live in Illinois and pay twice as much for health insurance than their counterparts who retired and moved out of state. “I should have been a snow bird,” she said. “It makes no sense. It’s a quirk in the law.”

There are a small pool of retired educators, and the pool is getting smaller as their numbers are diminished by death. The Illinois Teachers Retirement System has somewhere in the area of 150,000 active members the last time I checked. But there were only a few hundred teachers who had given notice of their intent to retire in 2003 and who were ineligible to buy into Medicare when it began in 2004.

Like I said. About 600 them. I’m guessing less than a couple hundred now. Like Jeri, they just fell through the cracks when the law changed. There was an easy fix though. It would have cost somewhere between $500,000 to $700,000 to fix it. Chump change really.

But the legislature wouldn’t do it. They figured if they ignored the problem it would go away. I mean this was just 600 old retired teachers scattered around the state of Illinois. Not big enough of a constituency to be afraid of.

It’s not like they were hedge fund managers or anything. Wait long enough and they would all be dead. But Jeri would not go quietly. She testified before legislative committees. She knocked on legislators’ doors. She contacted people like Kadner. And me and Glen.

Finally, she convinced former state Rep. Kevin McCarthy to sponsor a bill that would close the gap in monthly premium costs between Medicare ineligible retirees living in Illinois and those living out of state.

The bill sailed through the House with unanimous support and passed the Senate with only one “no” vote. Then Governor Pat Quinn vetoed it. It is one of the reasons I hated Quinn.

“The Illinois Education Association, the state’s largest teachers’ union, had waged a lobbying campaign against it,” Kadner wrote. IEA lobbyists told Kadner that they had “bigger fish to fry.” There’s a union slogan for you. Not all for one and one for all. Rather, we got bigger fish to fry.

One time when Glen and I were delegates to the IEA Representative Assembly and brought Jeri’s issue up to the IEA Retired caucus, Bob Haisman, a former president of the IEA, said the solution was simple. “She should go get a job.” True story.

I contacted my state rep who talked to Jeri and promised to sign on to a bill that was being proposed to address the problem by Rep. Margot McDermed, R-Frankfort, a bill that fellow legislators overwhelmingly supported before they learned of the union’s opposition.

“It was voted down in the pension committee,” McDermed told the Chicago Tribune. “The committee wasn’t really feeling the love. I didn’t get a single vote.” I never heard from my state rep about it again.

But every couple of months I would get a phone call from Jeri. She really just wanted someone to rant to, and I had the time to listen. Until that last call two months ago.

Jeri read my blog religiously whenever I wrote about pension rights, even if she could never quite figure out how to comment on it. The thing is Jeri was the face of the legislative solution to the huge state pension debt and liability. Even though I had never actually seen her face.

State legislators will tell you that one of the problems is that teachers are living too long. The truth is that at least for those of us in Tier 1, the pension problem will be solved when we are all dead. It will take a while, but we will get there.

So we lost Jeri, and it pisses me off so bad that the state won this one.

-Fred Klonsky’s Blog

The photograph is from a story about Jeri Shanahan in the Chicago Tribune, Aug. 2, 2016.