Teamsters' pension fund won't submit another rescue plan

Trustees of the Teamsters' Central States Pension Fund won't submit another benefits-cutting plan to the U.S. Treasury.

On Thursday, the head of the struggling $16.1 billion retirement fund said trustees met with fund actuaries and legal advisers and concluded there's no Plan B. On May 6, the Treasury Department rejected the fund's controversial plan to cut the pension checks for more than 200,000 workers and retirees, most of them in the trucking industry.

A second application would take too long and would not meet the final regulations Treasury issued last month for complying with the 2014 Multiemployer Pension Reform Act, Central States executive director Thomas Nyhan said.

The multi-employer pension reform law was Congress' answer to the Central States fund's dire financial situation. Two years later, the fund is back to where it was.

Nyhan said Central States has no alternative but to appeal to Congress again, although he acknowledged little will happen until after the presidential election.

The Central States fund holds retirement money for 407,000 people around the country, most of them trucking industry workers and retirees, including 22,000 in Minnesota. It is the largest of the severely underfunded multi-employer defined-benefit pension plans around the country.