Arizona high court bars cuts to public pensions

Headline Legal News

The Arizona Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the Legislature can't cut cost-of-living increases promised to judges and state elected officials.

The court unanimously upheld a Superior Court judge's ruling in favor of retired judges who challenged the Legislature's 2011 decision to cut benefits increases for retirees in the state plan for judges and other elected officials.

The Legislature cut the cost-of-living increases after the judges' retirement system lost money in the Great Recession after gradually becoming underfunded in previous years.

Denying an appeal by state officials, the high court agreed the increases are part of a promised retirement benefit and are protected by the pension clause of the Arizona Constitution. That clause bars "diminishing or impairing" public retirement benefits.

Lawyers for the retired judges had argued that the clause protected both their retirement benefits and the increases to those benefits, while lawyers for the state argued that the protection only applied to benefits with increases calculated by current methods.

Arizona is not alone in grappling with the problem of underfunded public pensions. A proposed ballot initiative in California would allow cities to renegotiate public workers' future pension and retirement benefits. Oregon's Legislature passed a law similar to what Arizona passed in 2011 that cuts future cost-of-living adjustments.

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USCIS Will Begin Accepting CW-1 Petitions for Fiscal Year 2019

On April 2, 2018, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) will begin accepting petitions under the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI)-Only Transitional Worker (CW-1) program subject to the fiscal year (FY) 2019 cap. Employers in the CNMI use the CW-1 program to employ foreign workers who are ineligible for other nonimmigrant worker categories. The cap for CW-1 visas for FY 2019 is 4,999.

For the FY 2019 cap, USCIS encourages employers to file a petition for a CW-1 nonimmigrant worker up to six months in advance of the proposed start date of employment and as early as possible within that timeframe. USCIS will reject a petition if it is filed more than six months in advance. An extension petition may request a start date of Oct. 1, 2018, even if that worker’s current status will not expire by that date.

Since USCIS expects to receive more petitions than the number of CW-1 visas available for FY 2019, USCIS may conduct a lottery to randomly select petitions and associated beneficiaries so that the cap is not exceeded. The lottery would give employers the fairest opportunity to request workers, particularly with the possibility of mail delays from the CNMI.

USCIS will count the total number of beneficiaries in the petitions received after 10 business days to determine if a lottery is needed. If the cap is met after those initial 10 days, a lottery may still need to be conducted with only the petitions received on the last day before the cap was met. USCIS will announce when the cap is met and whether a lottery has been conducted.

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