Oregon’s Public Employees Retirement System is in billions of dollars of trouble. But it's not just abstract numbers: this is a story about real people’s lives and it affects all Oregonians.

You can really boil it down to these big questions:

What do we — as a state — owe to the people who were promised a certain kind of retirement?
What does everyone deserve, in terms of crucial public services like education and public safety?
And what happens if the answers to those first two questions are at odds?

We talked to a number of people affected by, and trying to fix, PERS to try to find some answers to these questions.