Bill Neville peppered with tough questions at his meeting with an angry crowd of educators in Toledo 7/25/23
Area educators sound off on Ohio teacher retirement fund
JEFF SCHMUCKER
Toledo Blade
JUL 25, 2023
JUL 25, 2023
Visiting leadership from the State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio was met by an irate crowd of Toledo-area educators on Tuesday who accused them of wasteful spending and poorly handling the investments of its members.
Bill Neville, the retirement system’s executive director, stood before more than 100 current and retired educators who packed into Maumee branch of the Toledo Lucas County Public Library where they peppered him with questions about retirement investments, benefits, expenses, and potential cost-of-living-adjustments for members.
“That’s why we’re here, to answer those tough questions and listen to these concerns,” Mr. Neville said after the meeting.
Those attending were asked at the start of the roughly 2½-hour meeting to “be nice but firm” in their inquiries about the retirement system. But not long into the meeting, educators accused Mr. Neville and other retirement system representatives of dodging their questions and denounced past spending practices by system officials and the system’s board.
At issue was retirement system’s decision to pay performance incentive bonuses totaling more than $11 million to investment staff.
Attendees argued they’d seen little return on investments and hadn’t received cost-of-living increases for years until recently — a 3 percent one-time increase approved in March and another 1 percent increase that went into effect in July.
Those raises for employees come at a time when a special audit by state Auditor Keith Faber’s office showed a low cost S&P 500 index would have returned $90 billion more since 2009 than the system’s current investment strategy.
Jerry Mocek, a retired Toledo Public Schools teacher, was one of many teachers who repeatedly pushed Mr. Neville for details on specific plans to cut expenses. At one point, he asked whether there was support to cut staffing and salaries, as well as whether members would receive much-needed cost-of-living-adjustments.
Mr. Neville would not promise to cut expenses. As to cost-of-living-adjustments, he said he and board members would be seeking potential increases, but couldn’t promise them.
“He never answered the question on how they’re going to cut expenses,never answered,” Mr. Mocek said after the meeting. “It just really angered me that we’re trusting these people with however much money they say they have and they don’t know what they’re doing, and that’s what scares me.”
As attendees became more dissatisfied, they also challenged Mr. Neville about the retirement system board’s February split no-confidence vote in his leadership and Gov. Mike DeWine’s removal of board member Wade Steen, topics on which Mr. Neville declined to comment.
As to other concerns, Mr. Neville said at most about 72 percent of the retirement system’s benefits in some years come from investment earnings,not from contributions and added that financial conditions have improved throughout the past decade.
He added that Mr. Faber’s audit also found that the retirement system has outperformed a majority of similar pension systems and that there was “no evidence of fraud, illegal acts, or data manipulation.”
But attendees remained skeptical and again pushed back at Mr. Neville when he discussed plans going forward to improve financial conditions for the retirement system by seeking more funding from the state —particularly by raising schools’ contribution to the pension from 14 percent of salary to 18 percent.
Crowd members said they doubted that was an attainable or sustainable plan going forward. They added smaller school districts would struggle and questioned how that additional funding would equate to increased benefits or payouts for members, receiving few specific answers.
Read the rest of the article here.
posted by Kathie Bracy at 2:29 PM
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