Virginia Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell recently proposed that employees participating in the state’s retirement system start paying toward their pensions for the first time since 1983 to shore up the depleted fund. The governor conceded Monday, however, that even a 5 percent employee contribution may not be enough to cover the shortfall in the $50 billion system that serves about 489,000 active and retired employees.

“But it’ll make substantial progress towards doing that,” McDonnell said on Fox Business Network. “It might get us to 75 or 80 percent funded over the next decade or so, but not 100 percent. So we still have work to do, even with that, but it reverses the decline and gets us on a road [toward] solvency.”