Republican lawmakers are forging ahead with a series of bills that would impose new restraints on the Colorado public retirement system and its managers, setting the tone for a debate that is all but certain to spill into the next legislative session — and an election year.

On one thing all sides agree: For the second time since the Great Recession, the Public Employees’ Retirement Association finds itself in a precarious financial position. Retirees are living longer, and investment returns are lower than PERA expected when a broad reform package was passed in 2010.

The situation isn’t as dire as it was then, but it has deteriorated to a point that PERA officials will have to return to state lawmakers with a plan to cut benefits, boost taxpayer contributions or both to restore the pension system to its recommended funding levels.

So far, the battle for reforms is shaping up as a partisan fight, with Republican State Treasurer Walker Stapleton — a potential gubernatorial candidate in 2018 — at the center.

The Republican-controlled Senate this month passed a Stapleton-backed bill to cap taxpayer contributions at 2018 levels — a policy designed to take additional public support off the table as PERA’s staff and board of directors consider how to shore up the system’s finances.

Republicans say it’s a needed safeguard for taxpayers, whose contributions have gone up every year since the reforms took effect. Different divisions contribute different amounts. But as an example, school districts today are contributing 45 percent more toward PERA than they were in January 2010.

“This is an issue of such import,” Stapleton told lawmakers at a committee hearing this month. “…The giant sucking sound of a drain is real and it’s coming for the budgets of our school districts and our cities and our government.”

Democrats counter that Republicans are putting the cart before the horse, saying lawmakers should wait for PERA’s staff to complete its own review and make recommendations, after a planned statewide listening tour set for later this year.

“I personally think that we should work closely with PERA — rely on the professionals and actuaries who do this,” Sen. Andy Kerr, D-Lakewood, who co-sponsored the 2010 reforms, said in an interview. “Other people seem to think that throwing bombs” is the better course of action.

“… We’re nowhere close to where we were seven to eight years ago,” Kerr added.

When the reforms were passed in 2010, PERA assumed an 8 percent annual return on its investments. That target was later reduced to 7.5 percent, then to 7.25 percent last year. Stapleton believes even that is too optimistic — he has advocated for an assumed 6 percent return, which would make PERA’s finances look even worse than they do now.

In reality, PERA’s returns fluctuate wildly from year to year. Over the past five years, PERA has averaged a 7.5 percent return. Over the past 10, it achieved 6 percent, and over the last 35, it yielded 9.5 percent.

Caught in the middle of the legislative battle are PERA’s 550,000 current and future retirees, who fear what further changes will do to their retirement livelihoods. SecurePERA, a group that represents PERA members, argues that employees already bore the brunt of the sacrifices in the 2010 reforms.

Some of the increased taxpayer contributions effectively came from the employees’ pockets, because PERA took a portion of each annual pay raise employees would have otherwise received. Retirees took an even bigger hit from benefit reductions, such as annual cost-of-living increases that were scaled back.

Other Republican-sponsored bills would shake up the membership of the board of directors and give the treasurer access to financial information that today is considered confidential, two moves that Stapleton says are needed to increase accountability.

PERA’s board of directors voted to oppose all three bills, and they’re unlikely to pass the Democrat-controlled House.

“The Board did not believe that these bills would improve the administration of PERA or benefit the PERA membership in any way,” Timothy O’Brien, the board chairman, said in a statement.

The contribution cap measure, in particular, is largely symbolic. Current law freezes contributions in 2018, anyway — and lawmakers would have to pass a bill to change that. But it sends a message to the PERA board to think carefully before asking taxpayers to spend more.

Broader reforms aren’t expected to happen until next year at the earliest. But the statement bill from Republicans complicates legislation that was expected to be introduced this year to address the judicial division, which is in the worst shape of any of PERA’s retirement funds.

PERA officials have declined to say what solutions they’re considering to shore up the judiciary, but in a message to its members, SecurePERA, the advocacy group, suggested that higher taxpayer contributions are among the options being negotiated. Because it was in better shape than the other divisions in 2010, the judiciary was exempt from the contribution increases required of other government agencies.

“Many of the solutions the judicial division and PERA are talking about to reduce the number of years before the judicial division is 100 percent funded require additional employer contributions,” SecurePERA officials wrote in a message to their members. “This bill would prevent that fix.”

The early message from Republicans is that’s just fine with them.

“Maybe they need to come up with more creative financial (solutions),” said state Rep. Justin Everett, R-Littleton, who sponsored two of the three bills. “There’s other ways to skin a cat.”