PROVIDENCE — Despite an extended deadline making it less and less likely the General Assembly will embark on any major pension changes this year, state workers, public school teachers and union representatives packed a State House committee room last night with pleas to spare them any more unwelcome changes in retirement benefits.

Mary Forgue, a respiratory therapist at Zambarano Hospital, told the pension-study panel: “The pension plan means everything to everybody there … to change the pension plan is not a human thing to do.”

Others, including social worker Michael Fallon, said they felt state workers had been unfairly made the “scapegoats” for both the ballooning unfunded liability in the state pension fund and the “poor management” that landed Rhode Island in its current fiscal mess.

Another hailed statements a former — and long-gone — House majority leader made in 1995 when the legislature last raised employee-contribution rates as an immutable promise the General Assembly would never again tinker with teacher and state workers’ pensions.

Kelly Erinakes, president of the Coventry Teachers Alliance, told the panel that’s why she came to the State House wearing a button that said “Keep the Promise.”

“I want to know how that ‘fact’ became a fact?” the commission chairman, Rep. Timothy Williamson, D-West Warwick, asked Erinakes. “Who made the ‘promise’ …What was the context?” he asked.

Rising from her seat in the audience, Marcia Reback, the long-time president of the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals, invoked the name of former House Majority Leader George Caruolo, who opted against running for reelection in 1998. “It was George Caruolo who made the promise,” she said.

And so it went for more than an hour at an odd sort of hearing, held before the commission — empaneled earlier this year by House Speaker William J. Murphy to look at all aspects of the state’s public employee pension systems — debated, proposed or recommended any change in any state or local retirement packages.

A day earlier, the House approved a resolution extending the due date for the study commission’s recommendations from today until July 31, which will almost certainly be after the part-time lawmakers go home for the year. Williamson did not respond to inquiries.

Murphy issued this statement: “The pension study commission has been very thorough and it still has meetings scheduled through the end of May. Then the material that has been gathered will be given to actuaries to determine what the costs and potential savings would be to the State of Rhode Island. It’s premature at this point to say when the findings and recommendations will be completed.”

But when asked the prospects for action this year, Murphy spokesman Larry Berman said July 31 is an outside deadline and there is still a chance the panel will produce a report and recommendations in time for the lawmakers to act this year.

But the lineup at yesterday’s hearing made easy consensus unlikely. Only 4 of the 18 panel members who were present yesterday had no stake in the outcome of the deliberations over what the state’s taxpayers can afford and how that meshes with the expectations of today’s state and municipal workers.

More than three dozen turned out last night. Several used the occasion to once again urge repeal of the new age-and-work requirements — and minimum retirement age — lawmakers adopted in 2005 to rein in the spiraling cost to state worker pensions. The new rules required newly hired workers — and those not yet vested at that point — to work until age 59, at minimum, for a full state pension after 29 years of work, and everyone else with at least 10 years of state service to work until age 65 to qualify for a pension.

kgregg@projo.com