Albert McKeon reports in the Nashua Telegraph on the legal challenges to New Hampshire’s new pension laws, and includes the Josiah Bartlett Center’s latest study on the unfunded liability in the New Hampshire Retirement System.

The Josiah Bartlett Center of Public Policy released a report that gave an overview of the retirement system’s $3.7 billion unfunded pension liability.

Within that report, the Center claimed firefighters and police officers account for a disproportionate share of the unfunded liability relative to other public employees.

Basically, one firefighter in the system has the same financial impact as three other employees, according to Joshua Elliott-Traficante, a research associate at the center who wrote the report.

For instance, the unfunded liability portion per firefighter is $109,220, and the portion for police officers is $91,150.

Conversely, the unfunded liability portion for non-emergency workers is smaller, the report said. Teachers have a $53,143 portion and all other non-emergency public employees have a $31,813 portion.

The state firefighters union objected to the Center’s findings.

Yet, Professional Fire Fighters of New Hampshire President David Lang said he had no evidence to disprove the Center’s numbers on the unfunded liability.

The study, published last week by Joshua Elliott-Traficante, does not try to single out police or firefighters for the pension shortfall. It does identify which parts of the New Hampshire Retirement System have a larger unfunded liability, which should help policy makers as they try to shore up the system. The study makes no recommendations as to whether employers or employees should pay more, or if benefits should be reduced.