Dan MacDonald to STRS board: Have we gotten what we want?

Dan MacDonald's speech to STRS board 

October 17, 2024

Mr. Chair and members of the Board, good afternoon. I am Dan MacDonald, an STRS retiree with 38 plus years of service.  I am also the Executive Director of Local 279R, Northeast Ohio AFT retirees.

“It was the best of times; it was the worst of times” is a famous opening line from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. The phrase suggests that contradictory extremes can happen at the same time. Curly Howard, of the Three Stooges, stated it similarly, “I’m positive about the negative, but a little negative about the positive.”

Much has happened since the last board meeting.  Did we, actives/retirees, get what we wanted?  New leadership is on the horizon, this STRS staff and this board.

Over the past few months, I have heard staff presentations in the light of acknowledgement, not same old, same old. I pointed out in one of my remarks that the investment department shared that they might have gotten a better return if they had acted more swiftly.  My complaints about STRS never reporting “no bad news” is lessening because some bad news is being presented.  Senior management and staff are “stepping out of the frying pan into the fire” throughout the state. There is acknowledgement of members’ concerns.

The issues placed on this board, staff, and outside consultants are complex, and you better believe political.

The idea of prosperity and the feeling of despair are not solved by black and white actions. There are a lot of grays that need consideration. Let no one here forget the governor’s new cabinet agency, the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce and what it did to the State Board of Education.

We, the board, staff, actives and retirees, all need to be open-minded as the past is addressed into the present because the future starts tomorrow on a daily basis, and many constituencies want to take ownership of STRS.

I look forward to actions to restore benefits to actives and COLA to retirees.