Patricia Miller’s speech to STRS Board, May 14, 2009

Dear Board Members and Mr. Nehf,

“You get bonuses when you are profitable” – Sheila Bair of Who’s Protecting Our Money? (CNBC). You KNOW that STRS is NOT in a profitable situation. STRS doesn’t seem to operate much differently than AIG and Merrill Lynch when it comes to explaining the “why” of bonuses to the public and its members. To say that the investment personnel deserve bonuses as part of their already excessive salaries is unconscionable and defies any common sense. It is especially galling with the loss of over 40% in our portfolio value.

Concerning bonuses, Joel Kotkin of Forbes Magazine says, “The insane system that overly rewards a few for being in the right place at the right time has outlived its usefulness.” Are you listening, board members? We retirees are fed up with all the excuses for your actions concerning investment personnel bonuses and their salaries.

Then, to top it all, you give some of them a 14-1/2% pay increase. This “insane situation at STRS appears to many of us as a lavish squandering of our hard earned and well deserved monies. With many investment personnel making three to ten times what a teacher with 35 years experience and a masters plus 30 makes, don’t wonder why many of us are extremely angered with your policies. It’s not complicated, it’s just common sense.

Before you cut our COLAs and health care benefits, clean out your house, your STRS HOUSE. Perhaps cutting staff and reducing salaries at STRS would offset the need to reduce our COLAs and health care benefits. Do we really need 80+ investment personnel? Do we REALLY need over 600 people working for STRS? Let’s have a cost-analysis study on this issue.

It looks to me and to many others as if we retirees are paying the price for “someone’s” lavishness and misuse of STRS funds. You DO have our attention, board members. Remember this: STRS is supposed to be working for the benefit of its retirees, not the other way around.