The retirement benefit package for future Shelby County employees may not look like the one promised to current employees and already enjoyed by 2,800 retirees.

Members of a task force convened by Shelby County Mayor Joe Ford are deep into talks over how to restructure those benefits.

The task force is working on a proposal for Ford, who would then take it to the county’s retirement board before it goes to the Shelby County Commission.

Changes already discussed include bumping up contributions from future employees and adjusting retirement ages.

Some task force members have also mentioned that rethinking the pension plan’s expected annual return of 8.25 percent might be a more realistic reflection of the economy.

But because that expectation is already built into studies that look years into the future, lowering the expected return could dramatically change the funding picture of the plan today. Shelby County Chief Administrative Officer Jim Huntzicker said he thinks 8.25 percent remains a reasonable target for the fund.

“It depends on your view of the market,” task force member Joe Saino said. “Even if it’s at 8.25 percent, we’ll still have funding problems in a few years. The cost curve is still going up and over the next five years will continue to increase.”

A consensus proposal has not yet emerged from the group, and one may still be months away. But the bottom line is many task force members want to scale down benefits for future county employees to prevent promised benefits for everyone from turning into a financial albatross.

The benefits under scrutiny by the task force would only be for people who don’t yet work for the county. By law, benefits and promises to the county’s current workers and retirees can’t be changed.

“We’re narrowing it down to two plans,” Saino said. “A (new) Plan D for regular employees and a Plan E for public safety employees, which are about one-third of the 6,000 employees.”

Spelling out new early and regular retirement ages for future employees who would be steered into those plans might be one way to save money.

“Right now in Plan C, you can retire as early as age 55,” said task force member and Shelby County Commissioner Mike Ritz. “One of the prime drivers of the cost of our system is that we’re letting people out with 25 years or more.

“We could be paying out benefits for somebody for 40 years. And that’s just going to terribly burden the system if we keep adding employees and doing that.”

The eligibility of hundreds of Shelby County employees to retire this fall and draw benefits under the current system is contributing a sense of immediacy to the group’s work. So is the economy.

Public pension plans at the state and local levels got clobbered when the economy took a nosedive in 2007 and 2008, and Shelby County’s was no exception. In 2008 alone, the county fund lost about one-third of its value.

The county’s $831.5 million fund recovered from the wallop it took in 2008 by notching a 30 percent return in 2009. The fund kicked off 2010 with a small loss of 1.8 percent in January.

The fund’s future health depends in large part on uncertainties in the financial markets that have brought nasty surprises over the past year or so to all manner of investments. Managing the pension fund’s assets through those ups and downs is a separate issue from the benefit debate – although one affects the other.

Task force members like Ritz worry early retirement ages, coupled with long life spans, could spell a fiscal train wreck for the county down the line.