An obscure state pension fund committee will gather privately with Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli and his staff in a Manhattan conference room, next Monday. The decision they help DiNapoli make that day will either cost state and local governments tens of millions of dollars next year - or push those costs onto future taxpayers, experts said.

The group will be grappling with a difficult question: How much New York's $132-billion pension fund can reasonably be expected to make following the worst recession since the Great Depression .

For nearly 25 years, the comptroller has assumed an annual growth rate of 8 percent. When times were good, healthy returns on investments in stocks, real estate and bonds saved state and local governments hundreds of millions of dollars by keeping payroll contributions low - artificially so, according to many economists. More here.