The city has prevailed in a legal challenge to local pension changes brought by a group of retired police and fire personnel.

Superior Court Judge Sarah Taft-Carter on July 22 ruled Cranston had proven its actions were undertaken for a “significant and legitimate public purpose,” and that the plaintiffs – the 70-plus-member Cranston Police Retirees Action Committee – failed to meet several evidentiary thresholds.

Mayor Allan Fung’s office in a statement hailed the preservation of the pension changes, which “ensure the long-term solvency of the locally administered police and fire pension system and lock-in over six million dollars in annual savings for Cranston taxpayers.”

“This is a historic day and I am extremely pleased with this decision, which has been a long time coming,” Fung said through the statement. “I am proud that we were the first government entity in Rhode Island to reform our troubled pension system and have our actions withstand a legal challenge after trial. This decision saves the troubled pension plan, but more importantly, ensures that we did so without unduly burdening our residents with more taxes or deeper cuts in services.”

The suit stemmed from ordinances proposed by the mayor and approved by the City Council in 2013, which froze for 10 years the compounded cost-of-living adjustments (COLA) for retirees in the local fire and police pension system.

Following passage of the ordinances, the city and the police and fire unions reached a settlement agreement to keep the matter out of court.

That agreement – which won unanimous union support and received judicial approval – caps and otherwise controls the COLAs over a period of 30 years, including freezing the adjustments every other year for the first 10 years and capping increases at 3 percent. COLAs are capped at 1.5 percent in the 11th and 12th years, and at 3 percent in year 13 through year 30.

The action committee’s members opted out of the settlement agreement, and pursued the matter in court. They argued the city was responsible for under-funding its pension liability, that other cost-saving measures could have been taken, and that the COLA freeze constituted a breach of contract.

Taft-Carter sided with the city’s argument that the pension changes were “reasonable and necessary,” both to preserve the pension plan and to avoid a drastic, negative impact on city services.

The judge found the city provided sufficient evidence that “the Great Recession, the decline in state aid, and [the 2011 Rhode Island Retirement Security Act, or RIRSA] requirements created an unprecedented fiscal emergency neither created nor anticipated by the City.”

RIRSA, championed by Gov. Gina Raimondo when she was the state’s general treasurer, included a provision requiring municipalities to develop a plan to reach 60-percent funding of their local pension plans or face reductions in state aid.

The case involved the Cranston pension plan is not directly tied to the lengthy battle over the statewide pension reform, but deals with many of the same core issues.

Taft-Carter additionally found the city had “presented sufficient credible evidence that it adequately considered and tried other policy alternatives,” and “demonstrated through credible evidence that the 2013 Ordinances were circumscribed, temporary, precipitated by a fiscal emergency, and prospective.”

The 70-plus challengers to the pension changes will now be subject to the terms of the original COLA-freeze ordinances, rather than the compromise terms of the settlement with the unions.

According to a tally provided by Fung’s office last year, the local police and fire pension plan includes 459 personnel, including 33 active employees.

Fung in November of last year said he had been actively involved in the city’s defense.

“We put on the best case that we can,” he said at the time. “I’m sitting every single day. It’s that important of a case.”

The mayor’s statement thanks the city’s attorneys, William Dolan and Will Wray, along with its actuarial expert, Dan Sherman.

“It was a difficult legal challenge but our team did a fantastic job in presenting our case during the long trial, which lasted more than a full week,” the statement reads.