Maine Ass'n of Retirees v. Board of Trustees of the Maine Public Employees Retirement System

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• observing that the legislature “arguably treated the base pension amount as the benefit, . . . and COLA increases as potentially temporary adjustments to that benefit”
• holding the statutory language at best ambiguous and therefore unable to hold that the legislature as a whole unmistakably intended to create contractual rights in a COLA in place at the time that service requirements were satisfied
• finding that the statutory language was at best ambiguous, and therefore the retirees could not meet their burden to show that the legislature unmistakably intended to create contractual rights to COLAs according to the formula in effect at the time they retired
• finding that the statutory language was at best ambiguous, and therefore the retirees could not meet’ their burden to show that the legislature unmistakably intended to create contractual rights to COLAs according to the formula in effect at the time they retired
• it is not unmistakably clear that COLAs fall within the umbrella of benefits that the legislature is assumed to be contractually obligated not to reduce
• “[W]e assume that MePERS creates some contractual obligation and focus instead on whether COLAs are included in that obligation.”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).