Pension Board Chief Says She Won’t Quit Post : Government: Criticism of the panel’s travel policy mounts, but administrator, off on another trip, sticks to her guns.

The administrator of Orange County’s $1.5-billion retirement system said Tuesday that she has no intention of resigning, despite mounting criticism of the pension board and its extensive travel.

“No, I most certainly do not have any plans to do that,” retirement administrator Mary-Jean Hackwood said in a telephone interview from Chicago, where she was meeting with a real estate adviser.

Some members of the Board of Supervisors and others are demanding a thorough accounting of the pension board’s travel policy, with Supervisor Roger R. Stanton threatening political retaliation in the wake of a recent, 26-day trip through Europe by Hackwood and four board members.

Hackwood emphasized that the European trip was intended only for business.

“This bothers me a lot,” she said of the reaction. “ . . . I hope somebody understands that there was no effort, no intention, no malicious intent to have the retirement system pay for any of our (personal) expenses. I don’t know what else to do than repeat that over and over and over again.”

But as Hackwood was off on another weeklong trip with two pension board members to visit a real estate adviser, other board members here said they will issue a statement, possibly today, to further clarify their position on a matter that has made them and Hackwood targets of criticism.

“I am so proud of this board. It really hurts me to see these allegations being thrown around,” said Patrick Brunner, a sheriff’s lieutenant who is the pension board’s chairman. “We have some problems, but we are addressing them. We are looking at the whole issue of travel, and although we have a policy much stricter than even the county, we don’t think it goes far enough.”

Stanton, who has been the strongest critic of the pension board’s travels, stopped short Tuesday of calling for Hackwood’s ouster. However, he said, the pension board is “definitely a house that needs tidying up.”

While acknowledging that neither the pension system nor its board are under the control of the Board of Supervisors, “it’s our obligation to do whatever we can” in the travel controversy, he said.

The Board of Supervisors sets Hackwood’s salary, although she serves at the pleasure of the nine-member pension board. Four of the pension-board members are appointed by the supervisors for staggered three-year terms.

Stanton said he would make the retirement board members’ performance on the travel issue a test for their reappointment.

“I would not vote for another board appointee that we have now unless they stepped up to the plate and made sure this didn’t happen again,” he said. “This just outrages everybody.”

Board Chairman Gaddi H. Vasquez said he will ask the supervisor’s appointees to discuss the controversy with him.

“I intend to confer with those appointees and try to understand their rationale,” he said. “There needs to be a very swift and very decisive change in their travel policy.”

But he said that any decision to oust Hackwood has to be left strictly up to the pension board.

Representatives of several employee groups said they were not bothered by reports of frequent out-of-town trips made by the pension board and its staff. So far this fiscal year, the board has spent close to $60,000 on travel.

“There is nothing I’ve seen about these stories that imperils the retirement system at all,” said John Sawyer Sr., general manager of the Orange County Employees Assn., the county’s largest public employees’ union with 10,000 members. “The law places them under fiduciary responsibility to manage the assets of the retirement system. . . . They have to do a lot of work and make some trips to make sure what they know is right.”

However, not all county employees were happy with the pension board’s travels.

“What in the world are they doing overseas?” asked Tim Miller, president of Service Employees International Union Local 787, which represents 600 county employees. “Can’t they hire someone to make these recommendations from over there?”

Brunner, who went on the European trip, defended it as “essential,” but he acknowledged that probably only two, and not four board members, should have gone along.

Brunner also defended Hackwood.

“Mary-Jean has done remarkable things for the system,” he said. “ . . . She is 100% committed to the retirement system.”

Board Vice Chairman Victor Heim credited Hackwood with “doing a very good job in organizing the distribution of our money, the asset allocation of our funds.”

He described her as “an aggressive, hard-nosed administrator.”

Board member Keith Concannon, who also lauded Hackwood, said criticism leveled by Stanton reflected his lack of understanding of the pension board’s complex responsibilities.

“If he (Stanton) wants to do something, why doesn’t he . . . get on the board?” Concannon said. “We’ll chew him up and spit him out. When he gets on there and becomes aware of the enormity of this fiduciary responsibility, he’ll change his mind.” The 55-year-old Hackwood, who is in Chicago with pension-board members Robert Thomas and Mary Abbott to discuss real estate holdings, worked as executive director for the Missouri State Employees Retirement System before coming to Orange County in 1987.

Wendell Bailey, Missouri state treasurer, credited Hackwood with expanding the state retirement system’s portfolio, taking it from a “fairly local style, Missouri-style, to all these investors across the United States.”

That created some turbulence, he said. But so did Hackwood’s abrasive style and her personal expenses.

“She believed in a very strong executive director and didn’t want the board to have much of a role,” he said. “We didn’t agree.”

Bailey, who strongly supported Hackwood’s ouster from her Missouri post, said he had received many complaints from employees about Hackwood.

“Employees were asked to do personal services for her, and they resented that,” he said. “Some of them were asked to clean out her refrigerator.”

A series of state audits also found fault with Hackwood’s management of the pension fund. According to Don Waggoner, Missouri’s deputy state auditor, Hackwood charged alcoholic beverages, baseball tickets, theater tickets, long distance phone calls and travel expenses for relatives to the pension system.

But what led to Hackwood’s resignation, according to Bailey, was her decision to withhold information from the system’s retirement board. Bailey said Hackwood had received information indicating that former employees of the system’s real estate manager had filed a wrongful termination suit against the agency.

In the suit, Bailey said, those employees said they had been told to falsify information regarding the returns on the Missouri retirement fund investments.

“She dismissed that as frivolous, and did not share (the information) with the board,” Bailey said. “I did not think that she had that prerogative.”

Hackwood refused to discuss why she left Missouri.

“I resigned from Missouri,” she said. “I really don’t have any comments on that.”

On allegations that she made employees clean her refrigerator, she said: “You’re kidding. For crying out loud. That’s news to me.”

Hackwood said she is disappointed that her performance is being questioned. But she said she will not become involved in a personal exchange of insults with any of her critics.

“I don’t like mudslinging,” she said. “I would not get involved in it in Missouri and I will not here. That’s not my style.”