By law, employers who have contracted with employees to make retirement payments must make those payments.  The Courts have been consistent about this, as they should be. Without contract law there would be no rule of law. PERS has been "reformed" again and again, and we have seen some results, and we are waiting for these reforms to have their larger long term impacts. No one has been hired into PERS tier one since 1995. Regardless of what one thinks of what was done decades ago, schools and other state agencies simply must, by law, make the payments they promised. Revenues from measure 97 are restricted to supporting “public education (early childhood through grade 12); healthcare; services for senior citizens.” Measure 97 will allow employers to use other funds to make their payments into the retirement system. So--the retirements get paid into according to law and the schools and health and senior care get needed revenues from a new source. This is called solving the problem.