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appointed by Governor Murphy. But Heck doesn’t anticipate
anything other than additional value coming from those folks.
“I don’t think it will affect us in a negative way because the
governor was excited about this bill,” Heck elaborated. “The ex-
pectation is to be a professional organization looking for one
thing: to make sure we have a sound portfolio and funding
source so the state side of the investment will go up. I believe
the governor will put the right people in place because it will
alleviate one of the biggest red herrings in the state. We are the
pioneers to make sure we come out of the dark.”
The new board has made three visits to Trenton to attend
meetings of the outgoing board. These sessions have focused
on presenting practices and protocols to the new board mem-
bers for how to review and approve pensions due, whether they
be through retirement, disability or otherwise. One of the prior-
ities will be to maintain the process to ensure that reviews and
approvals are made in a timely fashion.
That’s the part of PFRS that is not broken, so the review in-
frastructure should remain intact. Other pieces like the meet-
ing schedule and various back-office functions have been pre-
sented so the new board can acclimate to them and facilitate a
seamless transition.
“The current board has laid out a lot of detail, even how many
calls they get per month and the types of calls,” Kompany relat-
ed. “It’s not like we’re knocking down a house and starting over.
In terms of infrastructure, a lot of what the current board has in
place is a well-oiled machine that has performed its function.”
So far, it’s not a glamour detail. The new board members have
been jotting down ideas, according to Kompany, and those will
be formulated into plans. It might not be a glamour detail come
Feb. 1, when, Heck insists, board members will be in for a long
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■ JANUARY 2019
five months of work to set up the new PFRS to achieve its goals.
The new system will officially come on line July 5.
Common ground has already been established on key goals:
ensuring clear direction on assets coming in, how to create pol-
icies to make sound investments and risk-return analysis, just
to get started. The newest infrastructure will focus on setting up
actuary, investment and audit committees. Two trustees who
are PFRS members will be part of each committee and initially
work to confirm an overall status of the pension system.
“It will be a twofold thing initially,” Heck explained. “We have
to make sure we have oversight on our partners. More specifi-
cally, the biggest thing is communication with our stakeholders.
They are going to see a dramatic change from what historically
we have done with the state, and people will be concerned. Our
job will be to make sure we get rid of the misnomers so people
understand what we’re doing on a day-to-day basis. Transpar-
ency is going to be a big thing.”
Heck anticipates a mechanism to communicate in real time.
“Markets go up and down, so we need to make sure the mem-
bership knows what’s going on in real time,” he continued. “If
things are going bad, they need to know what we are doing to
correct those problems and minimize risk. If things are going
well, how well are they working and what benchmarks are we
showing.”
Following the Feb. 1 marathon meeting, the new board plans
on scheduling follow-up sessions to conduct due diligence. All
new trustees will also have to go through standardized training.
All in all, though, there seems to be a like-minded commitment
to making the new PFRS an overwhelming success.
“We want to live up to the (Navy) SEAL team motto: ‘Be an
expert and being an expert,’” Heck concluded. “We want to be
able to figure out the problems and indulge ourselves with solu-
tions. We are all focused on making sure this thing works.”