Donna and Dean Seaman to Nehf & Board: Ready to listen to your excuses and justifications for your ill-advised decisions

From Donna and Dean Seaman, August 19, 2009
Subject: Board meeting

Board members and Mr. Nehf: As you meet in board session this week, I urge you NOT to reduce the cost of living adjustment for retirees. Our expenses have gone up (as has everyone's) for years, and our pension benefits have stayed the same except for the annual cost of living adjustment, which we badly need. You have, in my judgment, mismanaged STRS funds for years! Now you are planning to harm retirees once again with reduced health insurance coverage starting in January, and reducing or eliminating COLA. Your insensitivity to retirees is appalling.

You have continued the practice of paying performance based incentives (bonuses!) to already overpaid investment staff. You should not even be considering paying out an additional $3 million plus to them for the first seven months of 2008-9 fiscal year, yet the word is out that you plan to do just that at your September meeting! How can you look retirees in the face when you have received so much negative input from us about paying bonuses! There is absolutely no reason (including possible litigation) for such a move! The board has always had the power and authority to make changes in performance based incentives, and you should not continue paying them in any circumstances.

Already the 90 plus investment staff are paid (notice I did not say earn) as much as Ohio's governor, and some of them are paid more than twice what our governor earns! And they continue to be paid these salaries even when the funds are down $30 to $40 billion. I wonder, how many highly paid investment staff does it take to lose $30 billion? I do not agree that those people are your "best and brightest!"

While your decisions have negatively impacted, financially, my husband and me, for years, now I find that you are adding my daughter's financial well-being to the mix! She is a teacher with 20 plus years who is carefully making retirement plans for year 30 and you plan to jump the retirement age to age 60! I understand your need to make STRS "solvent," but again, you do not even discuss cutting STRS staff (long overdue) or making other internal cutbacks. Always it is the retirees, and now the actives, who suffer at your decisions.

I plan to attend the Thursday STRS board meeting and listen carefully, as I always do, to your excuses and justifications for the ill-advised decisions you continue to make.

Donna Seaman, 2002 retiree and Dean Seaman, 1986 retiree