It’s hard to have a lot of confidence that the Brownback administration’s strategy to shore up the troubled Kansas Public Employees Retirement System will work as well as state officials predict.

Last week, the state successfully sold $1 billion in bonds at an overall interest rate to its investors of 4.68 percent. That meets the 5 percent interest cap set in the legislation approving the bond issue. The state, which will repay the bonds out of the general fund, now plans to reinvest the $1 billion and use the earnings to help cover benefits owed to retired state employees. State officials are working on the assumption that the reinvested funds will earn an 8 percent return.

Supporters of the bond issue compare the move to using a lower-interest loan to pay off a higher interest credit card, which seems like a strategy that would mostly be used by someone who already was struggling with too much debt.

Nonetheless, Senate Pensions Committee Chairman Jeff King maintained last week, “This isn’t a crap shoot on the part of the state.”

Maybe not, but it still involves some risk. A lot can happen over the 30-year term of the bonds. Based on the state’s history with similar investments, an 8 percent average return isn’t unreasonable, but it’s also not guaranteed.

State lawmakers agreed to this funding approach for KPERS so that it could reduce the state’s contribution to the retirement fund and shift that to other areas needed to balance the state budget. That’s probably not a winning strategy, according to Moody’s Investors Service, which released a report just before the Kansas bonds were sold, saying that the move would do little to fix the state’s long-term problem with KPERS. The Moody’s report said that by issuing the bonds, the state was exchanging “soft” liability (the unfunded pensions) for a “hard” liability (the appropriation debt). The use of the bonds to provide “near-term budgetary relief” was seen by Moody’s “as one of the indicators that the state is having trouble balancing its budget.”

That’s not something Kansans want to hear from an agency that already had downgraded bond ratings for the state and its Department of Transportation. In addition, a report from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston University said last year that using pension bonds reduces a state government’s financial flexibility. A March report from Municipal Analytics Inc. in Westport, Conn., described the use of pension bonds as “always the wrong choice” in part because it allows the state to take a “holiday” from pension contributions.

State officials point out that the problems with KPERS began long before Gov. Brownback took office. That’s true, but it seems that the bond strategy may be just a different way to kick this financial can down the road to some future administration. It’s far from a sure thing, but Kansans certainly should hope that the bond sale proves to be at least a step in the right direction for KPERS.