CalPERS President Rob Feckner is reelected to 11th term
Board members of CalPERS, the country’s largest public pension fund, Tuesday reelected labor leader Rob Feckner to an 11th one-year term as president.
Rob Feckner, 57, has worked for the Napa Unified School District for 38 years, starting as a bus driver. He has been on the board of administration of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System since 1999.
Additionally, Feckner served as president of the California School Employees Assn. from 2005 to 2009 and as executive vice president of the California Labor Federation from 2007 to 2012.
The lifelong Napa resident has an associate’s degree in business and finance from the local community college.
The board, meeting in Monterey, also elected Henry Jones, a retired Los Angeles Unified School District chief financial officer, to a first term as vice president.
Jones replaced Priya Mathur, a Bay Area Rapid Transit district analyst, who was stripped of her CalPERS position after repeatedly violating state ethics and financial reporting laws.
During his long tenure, Feckner has steered CalPERS away from sometimes strident, anti-corporate activism; backed a campaign that successfully defeated a 2005 initiative that would have reduced some pension benefits; and helped the nearly $300-billion fund recover billions of dollars in losses from the recession of 2008-09 and its aftermath.
He also worked to clean house and overhaul policies in the wake of a 2009 bribery and corruption scandal that resulted in federal criminal charges being filed against two former CalPERS officials, a board member and chief executive.
“In the past few years, we have many accomplishments to be proud of,” Feckner said in a statement released by CalPERS, “but there’s still much more to do to ensure we provide secure retirement and health benefits to California’s hard-working public employees.”
Among those challenges is a potential 2016 proposed ballot measure that would allow cities and local governments to cut pension benefits for current employees. The board is expected to oppose such a measure.
It is also confronting the growing costs of providing promised lifetime health insurance to retirees and dealing with a gap of tens of billions of dollars in fund assets needed to pay for current and future retirement benefits to 1.7 million members.
Twitter: @MarcLifsher
