By: Russ Kamp, Managing Director, Ryan ALM, Inc.

We are pleased to provide you with the weekly update related to the ARPA pension legislation. However, once again there is little to report. We had one pension system submit their revised application. New York State Teamsters Conference Pension and Retirement Fund refiled their application on July 21, 2022. This Priority II (MPRA Suspension) plan originally submitted an application on January 28, 2022, which was subsequently withdrawn on May 26th. In the initial filing, they requested Special Financial Assistance (SFA) of $1.036 billion to help secure the benefits for their 33,643 plan participants. In this most recent filing, the pension system requested an adjusted $918.1 million to be used to cover the same population.

Based on the newly released PBGC Final, Final Rules (FFR), I would have expected the requested SFA to be greater than that of the initial filing. It will be interesting to see what they eventually receive once their application has been approved. Fortunately, there were no other plans that had their applications either rejected or withdrawn. In addition, there were no payments of SFA made to approved applications. Only one plan with an approved application, Local Union No. 466 Painters, Decorators, and Paperhangers Pension Plan, is waiting on its SFA payment. To date, there have been 27 applications approved and an additional 12 are in review. We are expecting much more activity based on the estimated cost of this legislation being roughly $80 billion.