Judd Gregg likes to be a budget watchdog. This year, he's filled our inboxes with diatribes about congressional spending, saying the dollars to pay for the rebate-check stimulus plan "will have to be borrowed from our children and added to the deficit." He wrote an op-ed piece in the Union Leader knocking the Democrats for a "fudge-it budget." (In case this makes you hungry, he clarified: "not the kind that tastes good.")

But this spring, as we've gone from State House hearings to read the latest from Gregg, we've been wondering: Was this the same Gregg who was governor back in 1991?

After all, Gregg was in the corner office when the state overhauled its public pension system, instituting the low-price-tag accounting method that legislators now fault for a $2.7 billion shortfall.

Repeated queries to Gregg's office got no response this month.

This much is clear from the record: Gregg signed the law - which sliced feared rate increases and, legislators now say, kicked the burden down the road - with little fanfare.

How much he knew about the unorthodox funding methodology known as open-group aggregate is an open question.

Former retirement system trustee Art Beaudry told a Senate hearing this week that Gregg was a significant player behind the action. He said that Gregg held "closed-door meetings" with the system's chairman and others to figure out how to cut costs. (At least some corner-office involvement is clear from the minutes of retirement system board meetings, where the then-chairman talks about meetings with Gregg staffers, legislative leaders and the system's actuary.)

Board members also got individual treatment, Beaudry told senators.

"We were being called into governor's office one on one," he said. (Afterward, Beaudry said, his own meetings weren't with Gregg himself but with top aide Joel Maiola.)

Corroboration has been hard to

come by. Trustees who remember the decision have been hard to find. Rep. Neal Kurk, who acknowledges participating in the 1991 changes and is now playing a lead in the overhaul effort, says he doesn't remember Gregg's involvement.

But this much is true: Beaudry hasn't changed his tune much since 1991. He questioned the soundness of the new system at a March 1991 board meeting, wondering, according to minutes reproduced in a study commission report, "whether the whole process had been independent of the executive office."

The path to a new funding mechanism began in 1990, when the system's board of trustees set off a firestorm by announcing huge rate increases of as much of 300 percent would be needed. In an interview with the Union Leader around that time, Gregg faulted poor decision making.

"Like so much else we're seeing today in government, this is a price of good times," Gregg said at the time. "During good times, decisions were made which reflected a belief that good times would last forever. Good times didn't last forever, and therefore we're finding that we can't maintain the obligations."

The most prescient person we've found in our journey through history was then-City Manager Jim Smith, who said the new rate saved Concord a lot of money. "I'm still concerned about a major increase next year - which doesn't look like it's going to be any better than this year," he said. "Basically, we're just delaying it."

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