By Elizabeth Bauer, “…at their inception and for many subsequent years, these plans were never really intended to be any more than partially funded … for years upon years, decades upon decades, the city’s firefighters and police officers bargained for wage and benefit increases via their unions. But they, too, saw underfunded pensions as so thoroughly ordinary and unexceptional that, so far as I can tell, it never crossed their minds to bargain for improved pension funding.”