An interesting article appeared this week close to our Denver-area home, shining a little extra light on the clearly mixed feelings that some state-level bureaucrats have about the embattled nature of their public pension plans.

Meredith Williams, executive director of the Colorado Public Employees' Retirement Association, and a former administrator of Kansas' public plans, will be leaving his job in a few months to tackle what we are sure is not going to be a challenging post, whatsoever – the National Council on Teacher Retirement, located in teacher retirement plan-friendly Sacramento, Calif.

Williams told Stateline.Org, part of the Pew Center on the States, a non-partisan thinktank, that his experiences with Colorado's own attempts to control its public pension costs through lower cost-of-living increases (a measure unsuccessfully fought by state retirees in court) and a lower assumed rate of return on investments, were just part of the increasingly difficult nature of taking care of retirement needs for the future.