Colorado's largest pension plan may face a $30 billion funding gap when it finishes examining its books this summer, the Rocky Mountain News estimates.

The Colorado Public Employees' Retirement Association, which serves more than 400,000 current and former government employees, will have investment losses topping $11 billion for 2008. Numbers are not final because roughly 20 percent of the portfolio is in harder-to-value assets such as real estate and private equity.

PERA will not ask the legislature for any changes to its structure this legislative session, however.

"These are very uncharted waters," PERA executive director Meredith Williams said Friday after briefing his board on recent meetings he's had with legislators.

"Just to say we need to do something just to be doing something? It needs to be comprehensive," Williams added. "To take a shot in the dark, in the business we're in, a mistake could cost billions. We need to do all the modeling and have options that make sense for Colorado."

The options studied will include both increases on the contributions side as well as reductions of benefits. The benefits part is the tricky one, as PERA has suggested in the past that it's possible that any member with a day of service in the pension system cannot take a cut in benefits without an offsetting reduction in the amount they pay into the plan.

PERA had made great progress in climbing back from its funding difficulties caused by the last stock-market drop of 2000-2002. It had a $13 billion funding deficit at year-end 2007, but it estimated that it would be on schedule to end the gap by the latter part of this century.

That estimate required taking its $41 billion-plus portfolio and making annual average returns of 8.5 percent. Instead, PERA ran into the market collapse of 2008. Through the end of November, the PERA portfolio lost nearly 25 percent.

PERA's fortunes grew with the market in 1990s, and the retirement association collaborated with the legislature to raise benefits and create early retirement incentives.

As the market soured in the last decade, its assets dropped even as its obligations rose.

The portfolio, along with Wall Street, plunged at the end of last year. PERA has said that it has tried to shelter its portfolio by backing away from certain investments, such as hedge funds.

Finance Editor David Milstead can be reached at milstead@RockyMoun tainNews.com or 303-954-2648.