The state of Illinois will decrease the amount of funding to the State University Retirement System by 13.8 percent in fiscal year 2005.

SURS will lose more than $41 million because of the influx of $1.4 billion received July 2, 2003, from the sales of $10 billion in bonds last year. The bonds were sold to benefit the state retirement system by paying down liabilities, said Dan Slack, SURS general counsel and associate executive director.

Sale of the bonds will allow the state to make pension contributions for the next four years and reduce the amount of money coming from the General Revenue Fund by $215 million, Gov. Rod Blagojevich announced in his state budget address Wednesday.

“It is a nice and welcome infusion of funds into the system,” Slack said.

He said the reduction won’t have a short-term effect, but if SURS is not funded properly, there will be a long-term effect.

“We are saddling our children with problems we should be funding now,” Slack said.

The 13.8 percent decrease in funding reflects a reduced state pension liability, not a reduction in the support system, said Steve Cunningham, NIU associate vice president of Planning and Human Resources.

“Any time there’s an opportunity to pay down liabilities of the pension system, it is a good thing,” Cunningham said. “If the liabilities are less, the state has the opportunity to have money for other issues, like less cutting and pay raises.”

Future cuts in funding may change how the system is structured.

“One thing we can see happening is to run a much less generous program,” Slack said. “It would be tiered by when you joined the public system. This is the risk if the budget isn’t in place.”

Past budget cuts are what got the the SURS system to where it is today, said Larry Sallberg, NIU Annuitants Association treasurer.

“If they put the money in properly in the 1980s, it wouldn’t be this way today,” Sallberg said.

Slack agreed and said, “It would have been funded at 100 percent if funded properly, but now our goal is to have our assets up to 90 percent by FY 2045.”

At least one department on campus has been affected by retirements. The sociology department had a trickle of retirements dating back to 1998, including three full-time faculty members last year, department chair Kay Forest said.

“They realized that after you put in 30 years, and in one case 39 years, unless there is a compelling reason to stay, it is better to join the retirement system,” Forest said. “None of the ones who retired last year left because they thought the ship was sinking; there were new career opportunities that pulled them away.”

While SURS funding may affect future retirees, it had no effect on history professor Elaine Spencer’s decision to retire.

“I had other things in mind. It wasn’t a factor in my decision to retire,” Spencer said.