John Curry, Damon Asbury and a rush job on HB 151

John Curry To: Damon Asbury, June 12, 2007
Subject: Re: Those "nasty companies" as taken from ORSC website (which subsequently was removed!)

Damon,

Thank you for your input re. the "rush job" by our Ohio Legislature concerning House Bill 151 and by the fact that you are saying that the litigation in Illinois seemed not to interest them in the least bit. I don't think either one of us was well-served by those who are supposed to be looking out for the best interests of over 100,000 retirees of the STRS.

John

From Damon Asbury, June 12, 2007
Subject: RE: Those "nasty companies" as taken from ORSC website (which subsequently was removed!)

John:

I wasn’t aware that ORSC had pulled the list of companies that might be prohibited from investments by the Ohio retirement systems. The original list, which was attributed to being our STRS list, was actually compiled by Institutional Shareholders Services, an independent research organization, on behalf of all the systems. This was the list that included Honda, etc. Later, the legislators produced a list of 19 (or 22, depending on how you count) oil-production companies. This list supposedly came from the State of Florida legislature.

When the sponsors introduced an amended version of HB 151, the systems created a new list based on the new criteria. It included some 75 companies, but the committee chair and sponsors weren’t really interested in this list, saying that we could probably debate the list forever and that the “Florida list” was the one to go by. Then, when the directors were called to meet with the Speaker of the House and the co-sponsors, they had yet a new list – this one with 52 companies. The new list was said to have been prepared the legislative arm of Congress, but there were three sources listed.

It has been rather amazing to me how rushed this legislative effort has been. I testified that hurried legislation, without the benefit of reasoned analysis, was not a good thing for anyone.

Interestingly, we mentioned the litigation in Illinois and suggested that the same thing would likely apply in Ohio, but again no one seemed to be really interested.

Damon