Auditor Selection Committee - Regular Meeting

Okay. Call to order City Northport Firefighters Pension Trust Fund Board of Trustees meeting Friday, 03/13/2026. Roll call, Chair, Terry McLeod. Howard Burrows, trustee.

David Hawes, trustee.

Tim Robinson, trustee.

Scott Duff, trustee.

We have a quorum.

Pledge of Allegiance.

All

right. Good morning, guys. I don't have any public comment cards, but I believe I saw one. Mr. Krajic? Oh,

is it the second?

Second. Okay.

All right.

Well, then

we'll move on to the approval of minutes for December 11 and 12/15/2025.

Just confirming. We're confirming we're

Both meetings are meeting minutes.

From both meetings, the emergency meeting and the regular meeting?

Yeah. I have meeting minutes for both, but they'll be confirmed individually. So the December 11 meeting, entertain a motion for approval of meeting minutes.

David Hawes make a motion to approve the meeting minutes as stated.

Is that the December? December 11 meeting minutes?

Yes.

I'll move a second. We a have motion and a second. All in favor?

Aye. And

then moving on to the 12/15/2025 meeting. That was the special one. Make a motion to approve the December 15 special meeting. Scott Doff, second. We have a motion and a second. All in favor? Aye. Motion carries. Moving into new business, Mr. Duff. Looks like a trustee term is expiring.

Yes. So Scott, you are the elected fifth member on the board. Your term ends March 16. So I guess if you want to serve another term and a majority of trustees on the board want to reselect you for another term, that this is the chance to do that. So Scott, are you interested in serving another

I am. Would like to. And I filled out the application through the city that they sent me.

Okay. So you're elected by this board. So this board will just need to make a motion to either reselect Scott Duff for another term, or now is your chance to get rid of him.

So I'm just

kidding. Kidding.

A motion to elect Scott Duff as the fifth member to the Board of Trustees. We have a motion. Do we have

a second?

I'll second it. Tim Robinson.

All right.

We have a motion and a second to reapprove Scott Duff for another term as the elected fifth member. All in favor? All right. Duff, get to hang out longer. Thanks. Hey, honestly, Duff, thank you

for doing this, man. Like, your history and knowledge of the plan and everything that's happened has been really helpful to me personally to, like, be able to sit in the meetings and be like, hey, remember back fifteen years ago when something happened. So thank you for serving on the board as long as you have.

Seriously. I appreciate it.

I like doing it. Like you said, I'd like to stay on for as long as I

can. Yeah. So yeah. Alright.

Okay. So I the next order of business in your packet on page eight of one ninety four, these are your actual expenses. Yeah. We're we are in March, but there's some some administrative delays in all of this. So these were your actual administrative expenses for the fiscal year ended 09/30/2025.

The state statutes require you to follow a budget, although you're not by any means required to spend the money. So your budget actually had quite a bit of cushion in it for fiscal twenty four-twenty five. You budgeted $262,500 and came in well under that at $161,702.97 And I did look at what you guys approved for the current fiscal year, and you did bring it down, the total aggregate budget down to $244,000 So just a little less cushion, but a little more appropriate for what the actual expenses are. Are there any questions about any of the expenditure lines or anything at all?

So I'd assume the fiduciary insurance being at zero is just because it hadn't been paid by the time of that statement?

That must be what it is, yes. Just the timing of the payment being after 09:30. Good question. Any other questions? We do need a motion to approve that report if there are no additional questions.

We've already set our budget, like you said, for the next fiscal.

Correct, yes. And let me pull that up again really quick. I believe it was $244,000 I can go over each line as well. Give me one moment.

I don't need to go over each line. Just making sure I thought we had done that last meeting.

Yes. Yeah, we definitely brought it down. And this was at the September 2025. So we would set the fiscal year budget before the next October period.

All

right. Scott Duff, we need to approve this, right?

Yes, sir.

Approve the budget as presented.

We have a motion for approval. Do we have a second? I vote for a second. We have a motion and a second. All in favor? Aye. Approval of actual expenses. Moving on to what is this? The audited financial statements.

Wade?

Good morning, everybody. You hear me okay?

Yes. Wade, good morning. And this is Chrissy. And I just wanna state for the record that one of my colleagues in our Cape Coral office reached out to me yesterday afternoon to say that the hard copies arrived there. I just don't work in that office, and so the board only has an electronic copy of your audit today.

Okay. Okay. Our apologies.

That's okay. They all have it. And that starts on page nine in your on your tablets.

Alright. I'm I'm sharing my screen, which is a copy of the statements. Can you all see those?

Yes, sir. Mhmm.

Yes. Okay. Great. Alright.

Well, again, good morning, everybody. Thank you so much for allowing me to present to you all today. As you all know, you all engage us each and every year to perform an audit and report on your financial statements. We've completed that task. We have rendered an unmodified opinion on your financial statements this year.

This is the type of opinion, that you wish to receive each and every year, so it's a it's a good overall overall report. I'm just gonna touch on a few items within the financial statements. If you have any questions, just feel free to jump right in. This is your balance sheet, statement of net position. You all ended the year with total assets of $75,600,000 compared to about $69,600,000.07000000 dollars from last year.

That's about almost a $6,000,000 increase or about a 9% increase over the 2024. On your income statement, your contributions from plan members, the state, as well as the city, that increased about 305,000 for 2024. That's about a 15% increase, a good strong overall contributions. The total additions this year, from from your investments, still a good strong year, just not as good as 2024. We saw 11,400,000 worth of investment income in '24, but about almost 7,000,000 in 2025.

Again, a good overall performance, just not quite as good as in 2024. This year, we saw about 3,000,000 in total deductions, majority of which are always gonna be in your benefits to participants. Between the benefits to participants as well as this year account distributions, You saw about a $460,000 worth of lump sum that's the onetime distributions in 2025. So that accounts for the the large increase from 2024. Again, all in all, a good strong year, changing in that position of just a little over $6,000,000 for 2025.

The next several pages are your footnotes, a lot of good detailed information on the plan itself. We'll go over all of those. I'm gonna skip through back to the RSI section. So you got you got a ten year history here. The the far left column is '25, and next is '24.

The actuary, I think, determines what the net or what the total pension liability is going to be. That went up from about 73,000,000 to 76,000,000. But, again, our net position from the actual fiduciary from the actual investments also went up from 69,000,000 to 75,000,000. So we saw a pretty good decrease in our net pension liability that the city actually records from 3,500,000.0 down to only 912,000. So as of the end of the year, the plan is almost 99% funded, up from 95% funded in 2024.

Again, very, very strong position to be in. Kudos to this board for all of your good stewardship and overall planning on on the market of of your investments. Then I'll just go to the pension investment returns. Again, 2024 saw a very significant increase of about 19.3%. 2025, again, strong overall increase, just not as good.

We ended the year at 9.9% of our of our rate of return. Then going forward, we've got just a schedule of your administrative and investment expenses. And then lastly, we have our what we call our yellow book report. If there were any kind of findings or material weaknesses, significant deficiencies, those would be reported here. Happy to say once again that we had we had none.

So all in all, very good report, very good year for the plan. Additionally, we provide to you all a another document that we call our a d and a, our auditor's discussion and analysis. In that document, we put forth all of our written required communications, as well as all of these upcoming GASB statements and standards for y'all to review. There really are none that are gonna affect the plan in the foreseeable future, but those are there, again, for your reading. Also, we do list out the fact that the firm does provide free CPE and training to the city as well as to anyone on the fourth who are ever to need need that or want that.

It is done virtually, so, anyone can can attend as long as you have a commuter a computer connection, those are again free of charge. So that's that's really all that I have for you all today. Do all have any any questions for me?

I do not. Thank you.

Mhmm. Alright.

And then we do need a motion for approval on this. Alright. So we do require a motion for approval of the audited financial statements as presented. Do we have a motion?

David, just make a motion to approve the auditor report and financial reporting.

Have a motion. Do we have a second?

Jim Robinson. I'll second. All in favor? Aye.

All right. The financial statements have been approved. We'll go into Doug.

All right. Thank you

very much, Wade.

Thank you.

Now just so you guys know, I did put the evaluation separately on the tablets just so when Doug's going through the page numbers, they will match the page numbers you had. So on your screen on your tablets, if you see a little arrow in the top left corner, click that. If you don't, lightly tap the screen until you see that arrow and then click it. And it'll take you back to the home screen. Oh, you're already there.

Yeah, let's go down. Think summary page is a separate one. It's beautiful. You're five.

All right, Doug.

That means all your papers

will match.

Perfect.

Thank you.

You have a good administrator.

Thanks, Doug.

Page five is where I'd like to start. I go high level. I've learned as the actuary. Don't get too far in the weeds. And when I cover the most important stuff, then I'll turn it over to the trustees if you have particular questions.

So I intend to cover beginning on this page, the contribution requirements, why they changed, the funded status and why it changed, and then, a review of if I have any recommendations going into next year regarding assumption changes. Very high level. What's nice those of you who haven't been here very long in the pension board, you wouldn't know. But, the format of our report has changed. And it actually includes more information that I like on the summary page.

This page right here has the Citi dollar requirement and the funded status both on the same page. And we always show the same two columns. So when I was here a year ago, the information on the right hand column was in the left. And I want to cover that part first. That right hand column, reflects the results of the 10/01/2024 valuation.

The valuation is always done as of October 1 every year because that's the city's fiscal year, October 1 through September 30. And that right hand column discloses the city's required contribution for the current fiscal year ending 09/30/2006. And you go right down to the very bottom number there and it's 1,034,706. The city can budget that exact amount because we fund the plan as a dollar method. We don't care about the ins and outs.

We don't don't care about experience during this current year, investment return, salary increases, deaths, retirements. That will all be captured next year. So that right hand column is the exact amount the city should budget for this year, that $1,300,000 And again, as a reminder, netted out of that $1,034,000 is the state contribution credit. It's the 175 monies. That remains at $250,000 per year.

That's an agreement between the union and the city going back many years, where the city gets the first 250,000 Everything above that goes to the membership share plan, which was a nice addition this year. Sometimes the retirees call it like the thirteenth check. That amount for this year was about $500,000 or so. So that was a nice increase. Now budgeting for next fiscal year, twenty six-twenty seven, the city should just plug in that exact amount on the left column, $1,456,709 Again, the same $250,000.175 credit.

So at this point, I discussed, clearly, it's an increase in dollar. What are the components of that? About $100,000 of the increase is due to the mortality change. I think I brought this up last year that, as a reminder, whatever the state, the Florida Retirement System uses for assumed life expectancy, the mortality tables, we have to adopt as a local governmental pension plan in Florida. So by our measure, in those new tables and replacing the old tables, it assumes longer life expectancy overall.

And so that's about $100,000 per year. That's the role of assumption, though. It's a pure guess. We can't I have no idea whether it's right mortality table for Northport firefighters.

Is it a firefighter table? Or is it just the general public?

It actually is. It's a table of police and firefighters nationally that have a governmental pension plan. So you would think, oh, that's got to be pretty accurate. Well, I would think probably it's not just in the general population. But whether Northport experience matches the national, we'll never know.

Somebody might, at some point, way down the road, decide to do a study and look back. The only way we can do that now is we got a time machine and went forward about one hundred years and then looked at the records. But that's impossible. I believe it's probably a conservative assumption, meaning we're probably forcing some extra money into the trust fund now than maybe is necessary. Again, it's a pure guess because I'm often asked like, well, how long are we supposed to live?

And the FRS mortality assumption, again, it's from National Place and Fire Pension Plans. It's about age 85, give or take, for Place and Fire. And for general employees, it's over age 90. So FRS changes is about every five years or so. They go through experience studies.

Five years from now, we'll find out do they have a different opinion. But in the meantime, we're going to tell the city, you need to throw in an extra $100,000 a year anticipating that this is the correct number. Now the other $300,000 or so because you can see the total increase is about $400,000 About 300,000 of that is due to adverse experience for the year, two primary sources. One is salary increase. And it's an overused term, but it's the only one I can think of.

I'm a broken record. Anybody who follows me around the state, and I handle about 80 different pension plans in Florida, I can count on one hand the number of cities that have not given salary increases above the assumption since COVID. There's a fierce competition out there. And so our measurement this year is for the ongoing firefighters. I say ongoing, meaning those who are actively employed, not in the drop, on 09/30/2005 and 09/30/2004, that same group, we collected salary information from the city.

And we just do a division, just take 25 divided by 24. And that came out to be 12.87% increase. Now I call it salary. The more technical word is pensionable earnings. And that could include anything in which the members are paying their the members put in 10.6%.

Anything any pay in which they contribute 10.6% counts. So it could include step increases, promotions, overtime that was greater than overtime in 2024 and also catch up pay. We know that every three years there's bargaining. And from time to time everybody says, we agree. And then what gets released is pay, the pay increases that have been held.

I don't know if that happened here this last year. I'm just giving you all the different ways that we can recognize what counts as pensionable. But in the end, regardless of the source, when the city reported pay in which the members made their 10.6% year over year was almost a 13% increase. The assumption was 5%. So we had assumed 5% increase and it came in at almost 13%. And so sometimes I'm asked at this point, it's like, well, maybe you should increase the assumption. If you see this pattern, well, we agree but not in any particular year. We don't want to chase short term experience. It's like, well, maybe we should up it going into next year. I don't know what's going to happen next year.

Every five years, we'll come back to you and say, Okay, here's a pattern we're seeing. Here's a recommendation. I would never reasonably come back to you and say, we should start assuming 13% increases. Firefighters would love it. The city could not afford it, trust me. Using rule of 72, if you increase anything by 13%, it doubles about every five to six years. And that's not sustainable. Given that, would I be surprised to see another double digit increase in the next couple of years? I would say I would not be surprised. That's just what we're dealing with right now around the state.

So that and on the investment side, you actually did very well market return. You get almost a 10%. But the four year average, remember, we use a smoothing. The four year average came in at 5.5%. Our assumption was 6.75%.

Is this Page 12?

Yes. Yes. Christy is guiding very well here. Yeah. If you want to go to Page 12, let me let's do that at this point just to show you some a five year history on investment and salary. Let's switch back to salary briefly. You see that table that, says five year comparison of actual and assumed salary increases? There's the 12.87 I was referencing and there's the 5.02 was the assumption. You can see over the last five years, it varies. Like in fiscal 'twenty four, the firefighters basically got nothing.

I've seen that pattern before elsewhere. What I'm guessing is you were probably bargaining in '24. Is that right?

I believe

so. Yes, right? Yeah.

Contract is

12 Yeah. And so nothing was released. It's like you were flat in '24. And then monies that were negotiated get released in '25. I'm just guessing here, which is why I see a zero one year followed by almost a 13 to neck. You average it out over the two years and it's like 6.5. Percent. So there's that history in the salary increases. The table below is on investment return. So yes, you got a nice 9.85% market return net for the year, which clearly was above your assumption, 6.75%.

So you're like, okay, actuary, then why do we have why are you saying investment loss? That's because we're using a four year average. The four year average is called the actuarial value, that's point four six. Now let's try and get into that time machine, but only go forward one year. In one year from now, the four year average will drop off the fiscal 'twenty two return. Return. And you can see that that is a negative 14. Now, I don't I'm not superstitious, but I also don't want to jinx anything. I have no idea what this year is going to get. But let's say it's anywhere close to your assumption, even a six.

Negative 14 falls off replaced by a positive six. That's a 20% swing divided by four, four year average is five. Your four year average could be almost 11% next year at this time. So again, I have no idea. We're still six months out from the end of the fiscal year.

But I would not be surprised that next year at this time when I present maybe hopefully in December and get back on the December schedule, I'll show you an investment gain. And the fund status goes up and the city's contribution requirement stays flat or maybe even starts to come down. But again, you have to see the actuary every year because there's more than just the investment performance. There's the salary, mortality, retirements, turnover and so on. I'm going give you one more page and then call it done. Can I answer questions up to this point?

Do you want me to interject to something that I was thinking about when I read this? Sure. So speaking of salary, I understand that, like, you don't want to have this, like, guesstimation. But if we're a closed plan and there's 20 something of us and you have a pretty good idea of what our current pay is in a contract, if we made an assumption that we all stayed in the same position and I could say, okay. In year one, two, three, this is what I'm going to make, couldn't we get closer to what that number would be rather than make some like, we're not going to jump into 13%.

But we

could get closer knowing that there's only a certain amount of members like, yeah, someone could retire, yeah, someone could get promoted, but we could get much closer.

That's a good thought. I would recommend that next year, 2027, is the next time to do an experience study. We do it every five years. And during those intervening, the in between, the four years in between the experience studies, we just ride it out. I'll come to you with and I can tell you, when I come to you with an experience study next year, I will be recommending increasing the salary assumption.

But in individual years, what happens is we just absorb the loss and the city starts funding for it the next year. The alternative, Dave, what you brought up is, well, maybe we should just change the assumption sooner. That would have the same effect. We would tell the city, okay, paying more anticipating this happens. So you can either do it, get ahead of the curve and we add it to what's called the normal cost.

Or we say no, let's just leave it for five years and let's find out if that happens and then it goes to the unfunded liability. I will tell you that either way the city is putting in more money. The plan is not being shorted. So it's it's either going to the normal cost or it's going to the unfunded liability. It's one and the same. But it's a good thought. But I will I can almost guarantee when I come next year in 2027 with the experience study, That'll bring up when I present the next report and get approval from you guys to have me do it. I will be bringing a recommended increase in the salary assumption. So we'll address it at that time.

Okay.

So let's finish up on the look at your historical funded ratio. If you go down to Page 17 or if you're visual like me, just a graph with green bars, that's what I look for. Here's a ten year history in the funded status. A decade ago, you were just over 100 and you hovered around there for a couple of years, went down to the 90s. And now we're down to about 88 or so.

And so then I'm often asked at this point, okay, do you have any concerns? What should the funded status be? Let me address the second one first. There is no absolute number where you should be. Like, oh, if we're above 80, we're good. No, we look for patterns. And what you want to see is something like this. There's very little change from one year to the next. Yes, there's been a slight decline as a pattern over the last decade. There's an answer for that.

And that is we've been ratcheting down your investment return assumption. I didn't look exactly, but I'm guessing about ten years ago, I think we were probably close to eight as an assumption, maybe 7.75%. We're at 6.75%. So in the last decade, we lowered the investment assumption, which we recommended because the plant is closed. You're shedding active members and as new firefighters come to the city, they're not coming to this pension plan.

They're going to Florida Retirement System. And so then you're becoming more heavy on retirees. When you have more and more retirees, then you have more cash going out rather than coming in. And so then what we need to do is scale back the assumption. Because if you have more going out than coming in, then James is working on with a strategy with you guys is how to get future investment returns.

And he's going to come to you and say, well, I would like to go after A, B and C as a recommendation, but I can't because you got too much going out compared to coming in. And so I can't do that. What that translates to is you can't take as much future risk to try and get the return. And so then you need to become more conservative in your strategy. So that explains largely why, in addition to some of the salary increases and the mortality change, why this funded status has slowly decreased over the years.

But the answer is what we just saw on the summary page. We're asking the city to put in about an extra $400,000 this next year to be invested and to begin getting that funded status going back up. So that addresses the question here, do I have any concerns And whether there's any particular funded status that you should be looking at, the answer is no.

So now when we lowered the rate of return, assuming rate of return probably two years ago or more, wasn't the city required to increase contributions at that time? Did they only have to do it in that interval period?

They have to do it starting the following year when you lower.

So if we already lowered that rate of return and they already raised their contributions, we're still seeing that drop, correct?

Yes. Because then the following year is, well, here's a new mortality assumption. And here's a 13% salary increase. So then we come back to the scene and say, well, now you need to put in even more. Again, if I was to guess next year at this time, what would this graph look like, add a bar to it? I'm thinking it's probably going to start slowly ticking back up. But it will be slow because you can see, in any given year, there's not a big change in the funded status. But we might come to the city and in any given year that it drops and say, you need an extra 300 or $400,000 But maybe next year, do the report. Maybe the city doesn't have maybe it's flat. Maybe they're at a high watermark for a couple of years.

We'll find out. But the city did what it did when they closed the plan, both police and fire. Was this happened in Venice at the same time. Everybody kind of got their heads together. It's like, let's do this.

There is no need to do it for fire as far as actuarially. You were historically you had started up this plan back in the '90s when this area was growing gangbusters and the city had a minimum contribution at that funding floor. This plan up until closure had been over 100% funded for many years. It was on pension wise, it was more expensive for them to go to FRS. We all knew that, but they did it for other reasons.

So as soon as that happened, I advised like, well, we can't stay with the 8% assumption. At some point, we're going to have to bring that down. And this is what's been happening the last decade as we've been seeing that. Had the plan not closed, I probably would have recommended we would have been in the seven at this point, not 6%, 75%. And you probably would have been still around 100%.

So questions, comments? Other details, I'm happy to go into.

So real quick, just a little bit of question there. Wade had stated something about 99% funded versus 95%. Where did that come from?

What was that? That is from the accounting statements. Wade was covering the GASB, governmental accounting standards board. That funded ratio is based on market value of assets. And your market return for the year was almost 11%. This funded ratio here reflects your four year smooth, which was below 6%. So those are the two primary there's some other differences in there,

but that's the primary difference. But the largest concerning factor, if we were looking at both of them, would be this number, then the

This page here, this funded ratio is the one that plans should be using for comparison. We call this the actuarial funded ratio. The governmental accountants going back about fifteen years ago, they wanted to remove smoothing because they wanted a more accurate reflection of the plan status. And they just wanted to use fair market value from year to year. And so that's why you can see differences in the funded ratio from time to time between the accounting side and the funding side.

Okay. Thank you. And how

does Northport pension fund compare to the other 79 that you're with? Are we all right there together?

You're in perfect shape. You're still almost 90% funded, but your investment assumption is below average. You're more conservative. The average in the state is about 7%. So there's no real apples to apples comparison that you can do. But I will say that a 3.5% multiplier with a COLA plan, with a 6.75% investment assumption and to have a funded status that's almost 90, that would put you above average with all of those parameters combined. Thank you. Yeah.

Nothing else? Okay.

We do need a motion for approval of the actuarial valuation report.

A motion? Make a motion to approve Foster and Foster's 10/01/2025 actuarial valuation report.

We have a motion. Second. We have a motion and a second. All in favor?

Aye.

Right. Boards approve the actuarial validation report as presented. Moving on to Mayor. James?

Good morning. I think we still have to do the return.

There we go. I'll let you handle it. I've been talking long enough.

I can pull up the exact verbiage. So every year when the valuation is approved, your administrator will send a letter to the state, declaring your investment return assumption for the I'm going to tell you the language here shortly. There's a standard motion. And once I say it, someone can just say so moved. And it's six point seven five?

Six point seven five.

6.75. Okay. Motion is that the board votes the declaration of returns for the plan shall be 6.75% for the next year, the next several years and the long term thereafter, net of investment related expenses. Anyone on a so moved?

Moved.

Right. And we need a motion for

that, right?

Yes. Think we got Tim maybe motion.

Have a motion. Do we have a second?

Second. Okay, we

have a motion and a second. All in favor? Aye. Motion has been approved.

All right. It's very good to see you all today. So I'm going to jump right in. You've done some heavy lifting today.

I'm going

try to do the brief on the performance review. You're off to a great start to your new fiscal year.

If you're watching the news, we've

got some lumpiness recently in the stock market. I think that's something we're just going to have to respect for the duration of the year. And I would just argue it's kind of aged out of last year so far. Nothing the plan hasn't seen before. And as the auditor and the actuary shared today, you continue to do well. But remember, we're not looking at the short term, but just one mile in the marathon. We're always looking out at the longer term. And when I review your longer term numbers, you'll see the plan is in very good shape. Then we're going to go into, your large cap growth search. Remember, we were talking about MFS growth.

It had some challenging performance. I brought some options to evaluate their replacement today. I have a recommendation today, a strong recommendation. So I'm a walk you through my thought process today, but I don't want to spend the majority of our time on that. And finally, we have an updated standing rebalance letter.

Salem is an awesome partner to the plan, and what the standing rebalance letter, allows them to do is basically remember, you have negative cash flow. You're paying more out in benefit payments than you're bringing in. It makes sure that we run a tight cash balance, so that they're able to pay benefit payments easily for about a quarter's worth. So no more cash than that because remember, the Fed's continuing to cut interest rates, so we don't want that to drag on our overall returns, but we want it to be operationally efficient. So I'll cover that to round it out today.

Okay? So just jumping into the big book, the performance report. I'm going to give a brief market backdrop on Page three. So on the upper right hand box of Page three, the top row, S and P 500, U. S. Stock market, returned 3% over the quarter, a lot of us do the better than expected GDP growth as well as companies continuing to impress with earnings. This led to an about an 18% impressive return for 2025 from The U. S. Stock market, three years in a row of strong double digit performance. So impressive performance the past three years.

Now there's been a lot of jitteriness in the stock market. We're seeing that continue with the war in Iran and and worries about oil prices and how that will affect overall pricing levels and inflation. But the fact of the matter is these big technology powerhouse companies continue to impress with strong earnings growth. So that's what we're seeing support stock market returns. Below that, the MSCI ACQUI XUS, the orange bar or the international stock market, returned 5% over the quarter, leading to a 32% return for the year.

This is significant because it marks, more than a decade that international equities have outperformed U. S. Stocks to this degree, and you'll see that show up in your performance when we look at your peer group ranking. Remember, your closed plan, we derisked you about three years ago, so we expect you holding less equity. You're gonna lag open plans a little bit, at least in the near term, but also you hold less international equity.

So we would expect you to lag your peers in this sort of environment. Finally, for the Bloomberg US Ag, The US bond market up 1% over the quarter, up 7% for the one year. We'll take that all day from the risk management section of our portfolio. Remember, we get an interest rate cut last quarter, two more interest rate cuts, over the fourth quarter. So this is supportive of bond prices.

We think the Fed is gonna kinda stall those interest rate cuts as they worry about overall inflation levels and how oil pricing will affect those. So any questions about the market backdrop? Exactly what we hope to see on any given year. Pause them to the right. So wonderful backdrop for overall plan results.

Okay. Moving on to page 12, the pie charts. So on the top left corner, the plan started the quarter at $75,300,000 It was up about $1,300,000 to $76,600,000 to close the quarter on the top right corner. This came after $50,000 in net distributions and about $1,330,000 in investment earnings over the quarter. So really impressive quarter in terms of investments.

I pulled your market value this morning after market closed. You are down, slightly, about 1%, to $75,200,000 if I would have pulled your market value just two days ago, you would have been slightly positive. So we're seeing some swings in the market currently. Any questions there? Alright.

On page 14, this is the most important page when we talk about your long term positioning and whether or not that supports your return assumption of 6.75%. This is what we're talking about, your policy targets, and you want those green triangles, your allocation as of quarter end to be close to those long term vertical targets. Remember, we derisked y'all your closed plan almost three years ago, from a sixtyforty, 60% equity, 40% bonds, to fortyforty 7% stocks, 53% bonds. So you're basically fifty-fifty on the gas and on the brakes now. So overall, plan is very well positioned.

I don't have any new recommendations as far as your asset allocation goes today. Turning to Page 20, just to jump into the plan's results. Looking at the top row and the fiscal year to date column, since we're starting the first quarter of your fiscal year, you'll see you're off to a good start, up 1.8% towards that 6.75% long term target, competitive with your benchmark, slightly lagging your peers again. You hold overall less equity and less international equity next to your peers. As expected in this environment.

If you look out at the 3.5% since inception numbers, highly competitive with your benchmark. And since inception, you've hit that 6.75% bogey each year since plan's inception. Looking at the fiscal year to date column, just to focus in on that since this is the first quarter of your fiscal year, you'll see total equity was the main contributor, up 2.4%, slightly lagging the benchmark at 2.9%. And domestic equity, you'll see MFS growth continues to be the primary laggard for performance overall in your domestic equity portfolio. International equity has been very strong, up 4.6%, in line with your benchmark of 5%.

Fixed income, also a good contributor to the portfolio over the quarter, up 1%, in line with the benchmark. Real estate, we're seeing that turn the corner, up almost a percent. That's, six positive quarters in a row now for real estate. So we're pretty optimistic that that has hit its bottom and is now turning the corner. So overall, that all rolls up together. It's a great performance across the board for the plan. We're always going to make adjustments as we go. We have a research team. They're always pounding the pavement trying to find the best managers for your portfolios. The fact of the matter is over time, teams change, strategies change, investment theses go out of favor.

So we're gonna make adjustments as we go. But overall, portfolio is doing very well. Okay. So on the next page, I just want to highlight and kind of set up the large cap growth search really quickly. So if you look at your domestic equity part of your portfolio on page 21, you'll see half of that portfolio is anchored, to the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index, a cheap passive index fund that holds

question.

Portfolio. And question. I And you'll see in the three, five year and since inception time periods that Vanguard equity income, the value manager, and I'll break down what value and growth just to remind everyone what that means in a moment. But you'll see your value manager has done a good job outperforming the benchmark. MFS broke while they've been kinda average next to their peers.

They have lagged their benchmark, quite significantly. I just wanna highlight, if you look at their benchmark, you can see in the five years since inception that the benchmark ranks in the top 7%, top 10%. So we'll talk about that more in just a moment. But I just wanna give you the backdrop for your domestic equity portfolio. Alright.

Any questions there so far? Alright. Jump into the smaller book, the large cap approach, sir. So if you turn to the first page, page two, end of book. Again, if you look at the Russell one thousand growth index, the ten and fifteen year, even going out further in the time periods, you can see the growth index ranks top 8% next to active managers, meaning that ninety percent of active managers fail to outperform their index in that space.

And the value index, you can see, the index is middling average performance, meaning that active management has a better chance of outperforming in that space. We've seen that exact story play out in your portfolio, right? And think about it, when we're designing a portfolio, we pay active managers to outperform, right? So we wanna make sure we're using active management where we have a high probability of success. When you look at that Russell one thousand Growth Index peer group rankings, you can say active management does not have a high probability of success in that space.

Okay? So turn the page. Just remember, growth and value. These are just two different styles we use in active management. Growth, you're buying the next best thing. These are high earnings expectation companies. You're paying a premium for them because you think those earnings are going to continue to increase at a rapid level. Here we have Amazon. So thank any of your big tech names. We usually fall into this space.

Value companies, you're gonna pay more of a fair value for them. These are your old reliables. Thank Verizon, utility companies, banks, right? And if you turn the page, the reason we use growth and value, the blue is when growth outperforms, red is when value outperforms. You see there's different trends through a market cycle of what styles and favor. We think by combining these, it's going to smooth your ride. You're not going to feel the full swing of a growth manager through this cycle. You're not going to feel the full swing of a value manager. So hopefully, it'll dampen overall portfolio volatility. And if both your managers do a good job, hopefully give you outperformance next to the broad market index.

Okay. Finally, and I'm gonna wrap it up here, why has growth been such a difficult space, for large cap growth active managers? You'll see on the far left hand side since 2015, that the Russell one thousand Value Index, the red line, started with its top 10 holdings making up 25% of the portfolio. Now it makes up about 19% on that far right. The yellow line, the Russell one thousand growth index, has done the opposite.

It started at about 25% of its top holdings, making up the overall index, and now it's 62% of its top its top 10 holdings make up almost 63% of the overall index. So the index has been very top heavy. I going able

I

to do

do

those top 10 holdings to that degree, so they've missed out on those great returns or they chose the wrong holdings. MFS growth, for example, in your portfolio, didn't hold Meta, Tesla, Amazon to the degree the index held it, so they missed out on that. But they moved to a non diversified clause, so they now have ratcheted up the concentration in their own portfolio, and that's why I'm less excited about staying in their portfolio because I see it as a change in religion over their MFS growth. So if a manager's gonna stick to a more diversified stance, to me, that would be more attractive than actually ratcheting it up now after we've had three years of double digit returns in the stock market. Okay.

Any questions there? Alright. So on the next page, you'll just see what the top 10 holdings are. If you look at the right hand box, the orange column, those are kinda the culprits. You know? All those big, 10 names we call, the top seven, the magnificent seven, but kinda been household names past three years. Okay. Jumping into the growth, search, page nine. So I brought two options today. You'll see on the bottom, MFS Growth, your income that manager, all these are mutual funds.

Right above the m s MFS Growth is the Fidelity Large Cap Index. You'll see it's a lot cheaper. The management fee for MFS growth is about half a percent. The index is half a tenth of a percent, because they're passively tracking the index. It's a lot cheaper of a strategy.

I also brought JPMorgan large cap growth, which is another active manager that we like in this space. Its fee is very comparable to MFS growth. So turn to page, a couple pages to page 12, and my page number is missing. Hopefully, I'll stay there. But JPMorgan, like MFS growth, they're shaking hands with company management. They're looking at balance sheets, making sure that earnings are strong. They're understanding the competitive advantages of the companies, their industries, the industries the companies are playing in, right? So it's gonna be more costly. Right? They have a lot of people on the ground.

They're doing, you know, they're doing hard research on these companies. One thing about JPMorgan, if you look at the bottom half of that page, you'll see the sector constraints are plus or minus 10%. And below that, the maximum position size is plus or minus 5%. So they're gonna hug the index pretty closely, so you're not gonna see the big swings that we've seen within that escrow. Looking to page 13, the next page.

You'll see JPMorgan on that top row has about 70 to 90 holdings, similar to what you had with MFS growth. So they're going to be more concentrated than the broad market. They're choosing what they think are outstanding companies, not just what the market holds. You'll see Fidelity Large Cap Growth Index is going to track almost 400 stocks. Turn to Page 15 just to look at the style boxes.

Remember, whatever, we decide on today, because we're using this as the growth component of our portfolio, we want it to be a true growth component. And all this style box shows is that all these options group closely together, so they are style discipline. Okay. Finally, for the performance, nineteen and twenty. So on page 19, gonna look at the bottom right chart.

Now, we don't necessarily want, the home run hitters in our portfolio because if they're taking a whole lot of risk and they're getting great returns, and we don't understand the type of risk they're taking, that might not always be a good situation. We wanna make sure we're being compensated for each unit of risk we're taking in the portfolio. So this chart just does a good job. The crosshair is the index. That's your Fidelity Large Cap Growth Index.

Farther to the right, the more risk it's taken. We quantify that as standard deviation. The farther up, the higher the return, right, over a ten year time period. The blue is JPMorgan, the active manager. You can see they've taken slightly more risk than the index and have gotten a very slight incremental return above the index.

MFS growth, your incumbent manager, is the gray, taking less risk than the index, but also got less of a return, so have not added value next to the index. Okay. On the next page, page 20, again, just another way to look at it, but just looking at the benchmark relative returns, you'll see in the eight, nine year, ten year, time periods, the red is the Fidelity Large Cap Growth Index. The black box can also be used as a proxy, for the Fidelity Large Cap Growth Index. The blue is JPMorgan large cap growth and the gray is MFS growth.

You can see over time, JPMorgan has added incremental value, but the index is very competitive in that space. So so my my recommendation today, since I think JPMorgan look. We cover about 10 different active managers in the growth space. I could have brought you all 10. This is the only one outperforming outperforming to the degree it is, right?

We have another one that has outperformance, but they're a home run hitter. They're taking a lot of high octane risk in their portfolio and they're hyper concentrated, which I do not think is appropriate for your closed plan. And we want our growth portion of the portfolio to take on more risk to chase these higher earnings expectation names. But I I do want them to track the index a little more closely. So if we did decide to go with active management today, I think JPMorgan's a great option.

They're gonna track the index. They're gonna wait towards companies they really believe in and think have an opportunity to outperform in the long term. But anytime I'm looking at management fees, I want a high probability of outperforming, right? And as we saw, there's a low probability of active management being able to do that in this space. So my recommendation today is to take the cost savings and go with the index fund.

Do they have any questions? So we would need just a motion to reallocate funds. Reallocate to that new fund?

Yeah. Motion to replace MFS growth with Fidelity Large Cap Growth Index. So we would do like a one to one. The current market value of MFS, just transfer it to Fidelity.

Chair would entertain a motion to move that from MFS. Do you

a a a So

bit bit of a

question.

That's

question.

Outperforming JPMorgan, but remember, you're paying for that outperformance. And JPMorgan has incremental outperformance. Now that is a net of fee return. We're only showing you net of fee returns in this book. So they are adding incremental value, but also their top ranked manager right now. It doesn't mean it's very hard. If you have to be in the top 10% to outperform the benchmark, that's great, but it's hard to stay in that top 10% for very long.

Are last several quarters?

Yes. I mean, it's pretty you mean like year to date, now that we've seen some rotation and some different winners in the market? Yes, like I look at MFS growth's return, it is more in line with the benchmark, but they are still slightly underperforming.

Am I reading Page 20 correctly? It looks like the Fidelity index plan has outperformed JPMorgan for the past five years or so.

Yeah. That's right. Okay.

Yeah. And like I said, the fees are super low. It's an index fund, correct?

Yeah. Only four basis points.

Don't know. Sounds good to me.

Any other questions? I'm

good. I'll go ahead and make the motion. Tim Robinson makes a motion to replace MFS with Fidelity as presented.

We have a motion.

Scott's out of second.

We have a motion to second. All in favor? Aye. Aye. All right. Motion carries unanimously. Finally,

I'm going stop beating you up here in a moment, but just a standing rebalance letter. So just an overview, and I already kinda went into it. I reached out to Salem. I got your average distribution amount for the last six months. You pay out about $200,000, per month on average in benefit payments.

Now you'll have contributions that help to fee some of that, but they're they're not always proportionate. They're not consistent. And, like, the second month of every quarter, you have, like, $400,000 going out and you don't really have the contributions coming to defray that. So $600,000 is kinda the buffer we're recommending here per quarter so Salem can just do their job and then the background be operationally efficient. So if they need to raise cash to that $600,000, you can see they have the percentages.

I went ahead and plugged in Fidelity large cap growth here just in case y'all made that decision, but this would be an updated standing rebalance letter. You already had a standing rebalance letter, but it it was a few years back, you know, when Carrie was still your consultant. So every now and then, we just and it worked it still worked fine. But every now and then, as the portfolio evolves, cash benefit payments evolve, we just wanna update this. And, you'll see I blanked out, the account number. I do have one with that account number today for signature if you approve this. I'm not signing this.

Yeah. Okay.

And this is a a letter to rebalance?

Is that what you're saying? Sale. Yeah.

Per sale. Okay.

How do you guys determine what percentage you're taking from? Is that just based off of what the expected No, performance in that fund

your strategic asset allocation, right? So we can't do that. Remember, real estate, you can't rebalance like that, right? Real estate has quarterly liquidity until it doesn't, right? It's it's more illiquid than these other daily liquidity asset classes. So and these are the only ones housed at Salem. So what we did is we took your strategic asset allocation. So say your percent target, to the Vanguard, total stock market index, and we did it over 90%, so just counting out the real estate. But it's just a function of your strategic asset allocation. Okay. Yeah.

All right. I'm assuming we need a motion for this one.

Yeah.

I had Chairman and I had a motion to approve the asset allocation as presented.

Tim Robinson. I'll go ahead and make the motion to approve as presented this letter.

Motion and a second. Called for a second. Motion and second. All in favor?

Paul's up.

Paul, how are you, sir?

Hey, I'm well. Thank you for letting me interpret by Zoom. Good morning, everyone. I've got an active agenda today.

Indeed. Good morning.

Would you like to take them in the order in which they appear, Mr. Chairman? Sure. Okay. The first one up is the discussion of the Cancer Presumption Ordinance.

The I'll speak for Christy here a little bit. And Christy, if I misspeak, which I don't intend to do, know you'll help get it corrected. But as normal, the State Bureau of Police and Fire Pensions of Retirement sent a letter to us asking why our ordinance didn't have language about the cancer presumptions. You may be aware that a few years ago, the Florida legislature and governor signed into law cancer presumptions so that if a firefighter has certain lifted cancers, they are entitled to certain benefits. A couple of those benefits are that if a firefighter becomes disabled totally and permanently due to the diagnosis of cancer or out of the treatment for that cancer, that would be a presumption that they would meet the requirements for disability retirement under our pension plan.

The second is that if the firefighter has one dies from one of those cancers that that is a line of duty debt for purposes of our pension plan, really welcome relief for firefighters in this state. It is the law anyways and our plan is bound to abide by it whether our ordinance says anything about it or not because state law is supreme. In the past, the response that the administrator has provided to the state is that it's not in the plan. And basically that the city's position has not changed. The city did not want to amend the ordinance to include it in the plan.

So my recommendation has been that we would respond in the annual report, as we have in the past, after we first confirm with the city that they haven't changed their position. Now another option would be, well, that's what we need to say anyways in the annual report in response to the state. Let me share. I like this actually teams because I'm going to do a share screen. This I think is gonna do it. No. Well, is it sharing? No?

We can see it. It's just a little small. Can you can you make it bigger?

Okay. Let me try. I may not be able to. Oh, well, I tried. Maybe the next topic on the agenda, wait, Zoom. Here we go. I can do it. Let's see Zoom. Yes, let's do that. Let's do 200%. Okay. We could send a draft ordinance to the city that would say this. I'll skip the preparatory language. It's a whereas the state of Florida has enacted certain benefits and all that. And the ordinance would just simply say what I've just said out loud.

Now quite frankly, whether the city agrees to amend the ordinance in that regard doesn't matter because state law prevails. So responding to the annual report as we have in the past is acceptable. So let me stop sharing well, I'll leave it on the screen and ask if there's any questions about this. And Christy, did I mess any of that up?

Down here. To No. To James. Doctor. And just for the record, so the state annual report, it's due every year by March 15. Once it's approved, that's when the plan gets its state monies, right? So this is something that, we're finalizing now, but they seem to be adding more and more questions each year. And in the past few years, they started asking about the cancer presumption. Specifically, it says, Chapter twenty twenty nineteen-twenty one Laws of Florida specifies that firefighter cancer related death or disability from certain forms of cancer must be considered to have occurred in the line of duty. Have the plan provisions been modified in ordinance to enact compliance with these new requirements, and to explain.

So, I get to that section and I'm like, oh, geez, there is no cancer presumption in their ordinance. Why not? And the explanation in the past was just, quote, City refused. And I wasn't sure if that was correct. I didn't know the history. And so I reached out to Paul. And as long as Paul is comfortable with submitting the report with how it's been done in the past, so long as the city has kept their position, then I'm comfortable too. It's just something in the report that tripped me up.

I had an extra brainstorm, If I may just jump in. We could add this to the summary plan description. We control what our summary plan description says. We do not control what the ordinance says. That's up to the city and the union. And then I I know that the union has no objection to including this language in the ordinance. But so we could because, honestly, what's the what's what's what's gonna really matter. Right? It's gonna be the members and and information for the members, I think, primarily. The board knows.

I know. Christie, we all know that state law requires it. If we have, you know, got for you know, member who needs these benefits, we're gonna make sure they get them. Right? But, for the members' comfort, it'd be nice to have in the ordinance, and then we would definitely put it in the summary plan description. But we could put it in the summary. There's nothing to prevent us from putting something like this in the summary plan description to point out for people. But in terms of the answering the state in the annual report, we have totally discharged our duties and obligations by answering it as Christine has stated.

Paul, So if we're going to state in that report that the city refuses, do we need to confirm that the city is still refusing that? Do you have a contact with the city that is affirming that? If not, do I need to follow-up with somebody here to ensure that they don't desire to change that ordinance?

Yes. No, no, no. Yes. Christie and I have been communicating about that. We would just need to confirm that the city has not changed their position. You see, I've kind of highlighted that. So it's just a simple act of just verifying with the city.

If they have

If the city says, Okay, yeah, well, maybe we'll entertain it, then we just would answer in the report that the city is entertaining adding the amendment. Okay.

That's something I would just I could just have a discussion with Chief Titus to see if he would be willing to entertain that because like you said, the union, I'm sure, would be okay with that.

Yes. It probably would be I don't want to speak out in terms of the pay grade for that decision would probably be the city manager level or the city commission probably the city manager level. But it may be the dynamics of the relationships are that the fire chief is a great person to ask.

Okay. Yes, I'll touch base with him and see if he thinks there's any ability for the city to agree. If he thinks there is, then I'll touch base with you before we send that. I'll do that today.

All right. When you're ready, we can move to the next item.

I've got a quick thing on this. Actuarially, we're already funding for it. We submitted an impact statement in January 2020 as soon as this law passed.

If I'm hearing correctly, Paul, you said that whether the city agrees or not, they have to follow state law, so they have to do it.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Let me tell you how it happened. If for some reason, it came to the board and we said, no. We're not gonna give you the benefit, that member would have every right to sue the board and to recover attorney's fees and costs, not just the board, but sue the city. They'd be made as a necessary dependent. And they'd lose because, I mean, it's it's a law.

Yeah. Okay. So do you need anything for that currently?

I don't need anything. If if I I as you can see, I've already drafted proposed amendment language. All I need is, if any if the city desires us to put the little put it on paper and make it look pretty, I can do

that. Okay.

It's it's already written.

So, Paul, would it

would it And, again, if you wanted if you wanna add it to the summary plan description for to just help members in their comfort level, that's fine too or not. Either way, it doesn't matter. We're good.

Paul, Okay. Does the board need any motion to direct you to send a proposed ordinance to the city in the event the city has changed their position?

You know, I don't think we need need a motion for that. That's always fine. Motions are helpful. So what I might say thank you, Christy. That's a great idea.

Don't think it's absolutely necessary. But let vocalize the proposed motion. And if a board member feels so inclined they could say so moved and then if someone would like to second they can. That motion would be, if the city, is okay with considering possibly amending the ordinance to confirm compliance with the cancer presumption as required by state law, that the attorney is directed to draft and send that, proposed amendment resolution to the city attorney and the city folks for their action.

So we would need to make sure that Chief Titus and the union is on board first?

So I'll

the car before the horns.

Yeah. So I'll touch base with Chief Titus and see if he's if it's there's any chance of it going through. And if so, obviously, I'll reach out to him, he can make that comment. And then if can make contact with the board members to just let them know what was done. Perfect. Yep.

Yeah. Want you to make sure that, you know, whoever chief Titus reports to in the chain of command or, you know, org chart is on board as well. Yes.

All right. So we have a motion to carry out that as discussed in the event that the city is willing to comply with that. Do we have a second?

Second. David Ross?

We have a motion to second. All in favor? Aye.

What's that? Howard?

Mr. Chairman, are you ready to move to the drop question?

Yes, sir.

All right. Let me get I'm going to do my share screen stuff, hopefully.

It's your new favorite thing, isn't it?

I love it. I love it. So now let me see. I probably I probably lost it all.

Do we need to give some background on this, Paul? I mean, some of us in the room are probably aware of what was requested, and I don't know if you

plan to do that. But

Yeah. And I'm just give me just one second. I'm so sorry. Bear with me. I had it all teed up. I had a nice little show. I was gonna present now, and I'm looking for it. Just one second. I'll I'll get it up. Oh, here it is. Right here in front of me. Okay. So I'll I'll put some I'll share screen in just a moment. But and and Chrissy can probably help me a little bit on this if if I get anything a little askew. But first of all, Chrissy and and Doug and I have been dialoguing on this.

And Doug and I actually think had a question. Question. I it about the

the

I

to Can I give the history to the board? Wish

you would.

You'll do it better than me.

So when I first took over or was assigned to this plan from Farrell, one of the first members I started to work with was John Wallagora. And the entire time we were talking, I thought it was weird that he was exiting DROP, but he also had an FRS account. The entire time, I thought that was weird. But nonetheless, he was, you know, finishing his drop. He was leaving, so I just didn't question it.

Well, then, about November, December 2025, I get a call from Kyle Dent. He was someone who exited the plan in 2016 when it closed. He asked me if he could drop in both plans. He said, I'll be 55 in March. Can I do the drop in FRS and also drop in the local law plan? And I thought, well, geez, I've never I don't know. I've never heard this before. You know, in my mind, I said, well, when you exited the local plan, you're going to get a benefit for you know, from Salem Trust for that portion. And at some point, you're going to get a check from for those years of service. So logically, you know, maybe.

Of course, then I reach out to Paul and Doug, I'm like, oh, my gosh. I even talked to some other administrators about this who are like, he can't drop. He exited the plan in 2016. He can't drop in the local plan. He can drop in FRS because he's in FRS, right? So this was just some kind of I didn't mention his name, just casually talking to other administrators and professionals. Then John Willis contacted me pretty recently, and he only had seven years in the plan before he exited. Now, I have since learned from Doug that I think at some point, when the plan closed, everybody vested?

Yes.

Okay. But in my brain, I'm thinking, this guy didn't even invest in the plan and he wants to enter the drop. And, you know, I don't care either way, but I follow the rules as they're written. That's my job, is to administer the plan as written. And so there's some confusion, you know, on my end administratively about who is eligible to drop. Do they have to be active in the local law plan at the time of their drop entry? Or if they are, you know, in FRS, can they, upon age 55, enter drop in the local plan? Personally, I am of the opinion that John Wallagora was, that is a bad precedent. I don't think that was right. I'm not suggesting anyone change anything or go after John or any of that.

But I think going forward, this needs to be looked at because, you know, Kyle, John, they're no longer in the local plan. They're in FRS.

So

that's the background of this. And I probably said a lot, but that's how all this came to be. Does that make sense?

I'm sorry. I did not mean to interrupt you, Christy. Have to wait to

No, you're good.

Volume works on this thing. Sounded like you were finished. I'm sorry about that.

No, I'm done. Go ahead.

Oh, you are? Okay. I'm so sorry. I hate that because it's hard to speak. All right. So the answer is that it is entirely appropriate that Mr. Wallagora entered the drop under the plain language of our plan in Florida law. It is not appropriate for Mr. Willis to enter the drop. He only has seven years of credit and service and does not have that.

So I'm going to drill in and I'm going to share the screen a little bit more. So first of all, the answer to how the answer to this question can be different with different plans. It depends on the language that was negotiated between the union and the city, which then is required by the city to be enacted as an ordinance. And what we do on the pension board is we'll often draft the ordinance language based on what the city and the union have agreed to and ratified in collective bargaining. And then the city attorney and the city folks review what we've sent and then ultimately pass the ordinance.

They are required to do so. And if they didn't then people action could be taken to make sure they did. But they did as we would expect. I want to point out before I forget that the entry the drop situation here in this plan is of no cost to the city or the plan. So that's important to remember.

And I was able to I think Doug will correct me if I misstated that, but I believe I've confirmed that with Doug that there's no cost to the plan. But the question is whether the member meets the specific requirements. The Mr. Willis situation of only seven years of credited service does not. The answer is that a person can enter drop if they are eligible for normal retirement.

And I'm going to share the language with you in a minute. Period. Okay? It doesn't matter whether if they're eligible for normal retirement, they have gained the right under this plan to the benefits of normal retirement, which includes entering drop. So then we need to look at what is the definition.

Again, I'll share the screen of the ordinance terms in a minute. But the definition of normal retirement is you've got to be and you guys know it, you've got to be age 55 with 10 of credited service or 52 with twenty five years, okay? So if you meet those requirements, you can enter drop even if you may have others, okay? It's that straightforward. Now if the parties, either the union or the city wanted it to be otherwise then they should have had a different bargain.

But that's what we've got. So let me share, first the, opinion that I provided to Dave Carroll. Share screen and let me know, I hope I do this right. I think it's this one. Do you see an email? And for some reason, I'm not able to share. On Zoom, I can see what I'm sharing, but I can't. Do do you see this email?

We can see. Are you

seeing an email?

Yeah.

Okay. From okay. You'll see that Dave passed this on to the Board members at the time back in 2017. Is my answer. And Pursuant to I won't try to highlight it.

Pursuant to the Ordinance Section two-two 30 nine(one), which I'll put on the screen in a minute, a member qualifies for drop when he is eligible for normal retirement. A member per Ordinance Section two-three ten(one) is eligible for normal retirement on the first day of the month coincident with or next following the earlier of reaching the age of 55 with ten years of creditable service or reaching age 52 with twenty five years of creditable service. I understand from his letter that Mr. Wallagora has more than twenty six years of creditable service. Therefore, can enter the drop when he reaches the age of 52.

That's simple. So let me share the ordinance. I don't know if I need to stop sharing. Let me stop share and then just pull up the the, ordinance and share. And this should be it. I'm hoping this does it. Are you seeing the, the ordinance on the screen?

Yep.

Alright. So this is the ordinance. It's part of the, you know, all of the different ordinances of the city of Northport, And this is the section I referred to in that opinion 10 nearly ten years ago. And here's the language. This is about the drop. Okay. So it's the drop section, and this is about participation. It's part b, and this is eligibility to participate. Okay? So you're eligible to participate if you're eligible for normal retirement.

Okay? So let's look at the definition of eligible for normal retirement. Here it is as I stated. It's a real bright line rule like it, not like it, whatever, either you fit or you don't. So if there's any more questions, I'll be happy to try my best to address them.

So now Chief Dent, he's in a similar position. He's looking at the drop. So he would be eligible for a drop because he does meet the conditions of, the normal retirement age with the years of credited service.

I don't know his situation, but it's straightforward. Does he meet these requirements?

He does. Yeah. He does.

If got if he's aged 55 10 years or fifty two and twenty five years, he's eligible for normal retirement. One of the benefits of normal retirement is the drop. And again, it's no cost for the city, no actuarial cost on this drop. Some drops are different, but our drop doesn't have a cost. Basically, you know, its pension payments will be put into the drop account.

And there's a benefit because Doug can correct me on this. I I think that when you enter when that happens, the pension contribution fee.

They do.

So the city would no longer and the member would no longer be paying pension contributions. If I'm wrong, Doug will correct me.

The member stops. The city always funds what we tell them to fund in total.

These guys haven't been paying contributions

since 2016. So

they're Okay.

Thank you, Doug. Thank you for that. That's not my pay grade.

Did I understand correctly that Mr. Willis wants to enter with seven years? What's his argument why he would qualify?

Because they deemed everyone vested when they switched. So, didn't matter what your years of service were. If you chose to switch from our current plan, the one hundred five that we're sitting in here, to FRS, they deemed you vested. And in good faith, I think, is what the plan was to try to persuade people

to do it.

They vested him in that seven years, and he jumps to the FRS. So he's vested for a seven with the 3.5 multiplier. But like you say, he doesn't meet the eligibility of the ten years to enter the drop. My eyes would breathe no worthless. Even though he's vested on his little portion,

I don't know all the verbiage

It's just of about our pension, but not the drop.

Correct. Yeah. I'm looking at the CBA just because it does have a little historical index. It does say where is it? Give me one second. Because it does explicitly say the employees who elect to join FRS will be vested in their accrued pension benefit based on employees' credit service and average final compensation under the city plan on the day before the city joins FRS. The employee's pension benefit will be frozen at that time. For the employees who elect to join FRS, the employee's frozen pension benefit will be payable at the current early or normal retirement date separation from Citi. Early retirement will be subject to the same conditions of benefit reductions as provided in Citi plan. So I think that kind of agrees with what Paul just stated.

In that letter today go ahead.

Go ahead, Paul.

I just wanna mention, this is our plan. The answer to this type of question could be very different in another plan. Correct.

Okay. Well, answers that. Well, that's good. Thanks for the clarification because there's quite a few members that are asking those questions, so that'll be nice to have an answer for them. And then did anybody have anything else for drop eligibility?

I guess to summarize, going forward, those members who had opted out and are participating in FRS are eligible I'm asking confirmation here are eligible for drop in this pension plan if they have at least ten years of service in age 52 or 55. I'm sorry, 55 or have at least twenty five years in age 52. If they did not have at least ten years, even though they're vested, they would not for drop. Is that the direction going forward?

That is the way that I understood Paul explained it, right? Correct. I agree with that. Correct.

That's helpful. So John Willis is vested in the sense that he's guaranteed a monthly benefit based on those seven years when he gets to retirement age, but he's not gifted three years get to ten. He's Okay. Understood.

Correct. He cannot enter right. If he cannot earn any more creditable service, there's no way he can ever drop.

Okay. Understood.

And I had talked to Kyle, to Dent, and he was asking me. And I had asked him if he had contacted you. I said, did she say you met requirements? And he goes, yes. I said, Okay. Did you do your due diligence on the FRS side? Because I don't know a ton about that, which he said he did. And I said, did they give you an answer if you're eligible for the drop in the FRS? And they said, yes. They said I was.

I said, well, you have your answers then because they're interpreting the ordinance as you are for the 01/1975. The FRS is interpreting theirs. And I said, the city opened up I don't like to say a can of worms, but in 2016 when they did jump and do that, it made him eligible for both. And it is an anomaly, and it is strange. And people could say that he's double, triple, whatever. I said, didn't do anything illegal. He didn't do anything wrong. He's eligible in both plans. If he meets him, I told him, great. Again, it's a very small few people that did jump that were vested like that.

When John answered that question to Dave, he wanted to collect his pension and still work here. And the ordinance says you can't. You have to separate employment. So his attorney had came back and said that, well, you do meet eligibility to enter the drop at 52 or twenty five years, which John was, and he did.

In FRS?

No, in the 01/1975. He was yeah, he did FRS. He was building another pension on the investment side, which was eligible. That's what he chose to do from that point of 2016. And that's just a little bit of the history. It is like he said, well, I need to talk to someone at the city to make sure this is correct. I said, you did your due diligence in talking to our plan administrator and FRS.

I actually I disagree. That is not my opinion for the record. I will administer the plan as the board and the ordinance and the attorney advise. But I think once they've exited the plan, they are a vested terminated member. They should not. So it is not my opinion. I will administer the plan as has been determined today, but I just want to state for the record that I just would I don't know enough about FRS. I do know that we submit ours. This plan submits an annual report to the state and I know FRS has their data, too. And if they were to see the same person and drop at the same time, could you be compromising your state money?

Is there anything I don't know enough about FRS. So that's really where my discomfort came from, mostly. Not that I don't trust Paul and I don't trust the board. It's just when the language is not perfectly crystal clear, you know, I'm little hesitant. But again, I'm just the administrator. Don't make the laws

The lay on which only addresses if you hit normal retirement to enter the drop on this plan. And I don't know what it says in the FRS. Obviously, he's contacted. You're saying that's clear, Paul, that when you meet normal retirement, you can enter the drop. It doesn't distinguish whether you Here's what

And when you meet normal retirement, even though you're terminated Yeah. Terminated and all that, you when you meet the eligibility for normal retirement, you're entitled to whatever benefits. You're entitled to normal benefit. That doesn't mean like, we we gotta con you know, we gotta give them the benefits. And one of those benefits in this particular plan is you can do drop.

Your pension contributions aren't going to you. They're going into a drop account for five years. That's really all that is. It's not giving the guy any

And

again, my answer could be different plans I represent. I have not been presented with this question, but it could be very different. It just depends on the plain language that the parties negotiated and were adopted in ordinance.

This next one, Terry, I don't know if I worded it correctly.

So I can kind of discuss some of the background behind that. So the discussion of opt out mechanisms for members exceeding 100% of AFC. So there are a handful of members that have brought this up that are requesting the board look at whether or not there is any option for somebody that when they reach 100% max benefit so after, what is that, twenty eight and onetwo years, I believe, employment, they have paid in to reach that 100% return. After that, they would be paying that 10.6% the fund with no continued return on investment. So the question is for those members that are going to reach that age, 48, 49, it's still too early for them to collect or go into the drop.

Is there any avenue for them to no longer pay the plan or any other avenues in which they can that would keep them here without losing that roughly 11% annually.

If I could, I'm going to let Paul answer the legal question. I want to address the first part. They are getting something for it. While they hit 100%, it's 100% of their final average pay. As long as they stay employed and get salary increases, their final average pay is going up. So it's not a frozen benefit. It's just simply capped at 100% of the five year average.

Yes. So I believe that if that was an option, obviously, that would be something those individuals would have to be aware of is that if they tried to do that, if it's even possible, their AFC, I imagine, would be calculated at that point when they stop contributing. So Paul, is that even something that is viable? Is that something that is possible on a plan?

No. And I'm having a I have a little trouble hearing some of what you're saying, Mr. Chairman. We're on the last item under me on the agenda, correct?

Yes. The opt out mechanism. So, essentially, these The

answer is that that's the that's the opting out mechanism for members who exceed 100% of their Yes. Okay. Now I agree with the city on this one. There's got to be a bona fide separation of employment. And I agree with the city, and I think Christy wrote on that also. There's got to be a break in employment be rehired by the city, the plan is terminated. So I mean I don't so it's the way

that I understood the separation of employment was for people that were there was an attempt of people to try and go into FRS at that point. They wanted to switch from the private plan to FRS. I understand the separated employment is very, specific there. This was, more of a question of can they turn off their contributions, lock in their AFC at, let's say, 49 years old and just essentially sit in place so they're no longer paying it?

No. And I think those of you who've worked with me long enough know that I view my role as the Board's attorney to assist the Board in its fiduciary responsibility to the members. Our role is for the members and the members' benefits, okay? And that is purely our job. And if I could find a way, I would. I don't see a way here. Now if the member wants to try to convince me, have at it. I've always welcomed any input.

Okay. Just to clarify, Sometimes would a little too much. Would there be a cost to the plan or to the city for a member to if that was possible, would there be a cost to the city or the plan for somebody to lock in their AFC once they reach 100% and then no longer contribute?

Well, would there be a cost? That's an actuarial question. But listen, if the union and the city were to negotiate a resolution to this and then ratify it, that's a solution.

Okay.

I mean, it could be done through collective bargaining. But in terms of the way the plan is written down, what we've got in front of us, in our role as administering what we're given by the city and by the union, I don't see a way. I agree with Christy, and I agree with the city on this. And then so I guess maybe, hypothetically, if they the parties were to negotiate, but then there's also state statutes that may provide some limitations on the businesses. I believe there's a requirement off the top of my head that you can't there's got to be a break in service, I think.

I may be wrong about that. But look, the bottom line is, given what we have, there's not I don't see a way here other than, you know, this maybe bargaining, maybe.

Okay. Alright. Doug, if you could give me

a hypothetical. So someone reaches they're 49 years old. They're at 100%. They're going to keep working for three more years. We say, Okay, you're not contributing 10.6% anymore, but you're also not accruing any more benefit. What is more cost effective, the fact that they're not contributing or the fact that we froze their AFC at that time? I know you can't estimate. Let's just say average salary increases of a couple of percent or something like that. Like, what's the net benefit or detriment to the plan?

Would you is that for Doug?

Yes, sir.

I mean, there's no detriment. It's actuaries. We hear a benefit proposal and we value it. We'll show the impact. In this case, like I'll freeze the benefit, examine and do a hard freeze, but then stop the member contribution from the members. That's likely to have a net cost savings to the plan. It's likely to lower the city's contribution requirement a bit. Because even though the benefits capped at 100%, we would keep projecting out increases in salaries. And so the member would be rolling the dice, like I'm out. I don't want to put my 10 points.

Well, what happens if they're I'm going to stay employed for a few more years and what comes along is another 13% increase. Like, oh darn it, can I put my 10.6% back in now? Well, no. So that's why I think there's a greater likelihood that the city benefits if you would do a hard freeze on the member's benefit and allow them to stop contributing. There's other variations on this as well. I've seen in other plans like, all right, we're at 100%. Let us keep getting the salary increases. Don't do a hard freeze, but can we put in something less than 10.6 I can run scenarios on that. We have a couple of plans that do that. And it's a minimal impact as far as city funding.

It hardly moves the needle. But it's something that the members might be interested in and maybe they have the option. Again, they would be so you can do that, lower the contribution and let them still get pay raises or shut off the contributions to the member and do a hard freeze. There's different ways of doing this. And I can run scenarios. I think it would be part of bargaining. We can't just do it administratively as the board. But I will tell you that this would be a minimal impact to the city.

I honestly think it would be a tough sell because it affects 10 people and you're going to have to have the whole it's going to have to be approved by everyone that's bargaining, right? So my suggestion is there's a year before the next contract negotiation. Someone that's really trying to champion this needs to work all that out and bring it forward so that it could be entertained, not give hypotheticals. So if they were like, the most reasonable thing in my opinion is that you say, well, you're risking it if you cut your salary off because look historically, look at the past six years, how much that's changed for us. Like, that would be foolish in my opinion.

But if they said, hey, we want to pay half 5.3 so that it's a lesser thing or whatever that number is, what is that going to do? Like in the bargaining agreement, like there's this pot of money you always talk about for raises the benefits and all those things. Like if that was factored in there, everyone would have to agree to it, whoever is negotiating on their behalf and all those things. So I think there's an opportunity, though, like Doug was saying, to do that. Terry, maybe that's what

No, I agree. I think we try and bring a cost to the city to the bargaining unit and have guys that are not receiving the benefit giving away these funds that they could get for pay raises. It might be a tough sell. But that's not really what I that's not our concern, whether the CPA whether they can get that agreement. It's just whether or not there is an option for the union to pursue this if they wanted to. But as I understand it, the union and the city would have to agree to any of this. As far as doing a study to determine the cost, that would be something we would authorize. But that would be after it's formally requested by another party, I assume?

I would think. I mean, I take direction always from the board. You decide at what point you want to have me run numbers.

So Chief Titus did speak to me. He's in a meeting. He was unable to come to this. But he said that he is interested in the idea of this just because of I don't know about how much it would cost the city, but preferably or I think he was more speaking to the locking your benefit Can somebody opt out and just kind of calculate their AFC? So I don't know if that calculation can be done or should be done or if those calculations should be done at the same time if that's I don't know what the cost impact would be for that study. But it was brought to me by the chief that he would be interested in seeing if that's an option.

Mr. Chairman, may I oh, I'm sorry, Scott.

No, go ahead, Paul.

You start. Maybe you're going to touch base on what I'm going to ask.

It is totally within the Board's authority and jurisdiction and indeed role fiduciary duty to authorize the reasonable thing to authorize the actuary to conduct that review and to provide that information if the board so chooses to the city and the union or whoever to that you are authorized to do this.

This

being have the actuary help you with it.

Well, and that's what I was

going to ask, Paul, is if this all has to be negotiated. If, you know, we wanna say, hey, what's this gonna cost? Is it better for us to forward that to the union to say, you've looked into this. This is gonna be the cost to this. Is it better to do it before? Or like you say, if you go to the table and go, I have no clue what this is gonna cost, it's kinda crazy because if it's a 100 you know, whatever. No cost or little cost to hundreds of thousands of dollars. So for us, it's kind of like due diligence to say, hey, let's do have Doug punch numbers on this to say and give it to the union to say, hey, if you're going to negotiate this, go ahead. Here's the cost.

It's or the city. I mean, you know, both parties can bring it to the table. Yeah. You know? And so absolutely. And I'll give you let me give you an example. I mean, it's something that pension boards do all the time. So one of the plans I represent is the Green Coast Springs Police Pension Fund. That is not a unionized workforce. There's no union. And no one was it's the pension the pension plan's duty is to elect members. And if you have some great ideas or learn something, how would anybody know? Right? You just got to hope that the union hears or somebody goes and tells the union, hey, maybe you want to look at this or goes and tells the chief for this city. I mean, so yes.

The answer is yes. By all means, you can have this analysis performed. It's a reasonable expenditure.

Okay. All right.

I don't know much about what has been asked besides this. I know some of the members, Dawson, had come here asked about jumping doing the start stop again and jumping back into the FRS. Again, I have no clue what

Yeah. Think that jumping into I the FRS think Paul spoke to do the jump in FRS, that's a clear separation of employment. That's a whole separate animal that I don't think is part of this line item. I think this is more specific to the people that are in the plan that want to continue employment that may be reaching that 100%. They're just trying to make those decisions of do they stay in this area, continue to work whatever, pay that 11%, or is there options for them to not do that? So whether they determine to do that and lock in their AFC, that would be up to the individual if it is an option at all. Yeah, Doug, do you have any idea, we're authorized. If we were to authorize this, like, what does it cost like this or a study like this cost roughly? Is that

For us to do the work, I'd say not to exceed $2,000 for the couple of scenarios that I brought up.

Do we need to make a motion to run the actual numbers? Have Doug run them?

Yes. Just to clarify, Doug, if you were going to run those numbers, would you run them in both methods, the one which the AFC lock in and the other one would be the reduced contributions

just to see both? Yeah. Shut the contributions off, take the member down to zero, and do a hard freeze. And then the other one is, what, let the pay averages increase, but what, a 5.3? Just cut it in half?

I'm not sure what you've if you've done this with other plans or haven't would be actually

It's very possible. I mean, there's no rule of thumb on it. It's simply what the members we're trying to guess what the members might

want. So 5.3%

and keep the salary increases going, but still at 100% the cap. So those two scenarios. And again, I know you're getting ready to direct me on this. It's going to be kind of a complete guess on my part. I'm going to have to get a little creative.

I'm going to have to look at the members who are coming up to normal retirement or they're 100% cap soon, like in the next year, and I'm going to be measuring them. If we don't have a lot you could have in the future where five occur in any given year. But then it's a guess as well, will they take advantage of it or not? So I'm at this point, the actuary sometimes can actually get very precise with trying to be like, I want to multiply or increase on an improved COLA for everybody. Okay.

Well, that's kind of easy. Here, I'm taking a guess as to what may happen in the future, and it's a complete guess. So I think I can come up with a reasonable idea so everybody can see it's what I said. It's not a big impact to the city.

All right. Yeah. So to do that, if you guys would like to, obviously, we would have to entertain a motion to conduct the study as presented to answer those two questions.

Do we want to I mean, can we like pull the however many people this is and say, hey, are you willing to continue to pay half of your contribution in order to keep receiving your salary increases to adjust your AFC? Or are they wanting like a complete shutoff 100 and 100? I honestly don't even know. I've talked to people about it, but not this is what I'm proposing.

I don't think there's been a definitive, this is what I want. I think it's just what are my options. And right now, we don't have an option

for Well, you still want to say, hey, go do all this work. And then they're like, no, I don't want to entertain that at all. You know what

I mean? Well, but again, those individuals probably wouldn't have an answer for what they would like to do without knowing what the benefit would be. Like if they're frozen, as no contribution

That's better too because you

have no

idea what the next two contracts would be. That's what you'd be getting. They would.

They should go on the portal and say, well, if I don't do this and I keep paying my 10.6% and here's what I think personally I'll get for pay raises, run it. Yeah. And say, well, let's put in a 0% increase first assume salary and take away my take. Because they can do their own math like, oh, hey, honey, look at the paycheck. If the 10.6 goes away, we'll get this. If we keep paying the 10.6%, we get this. They can do it on the portal. So they're kind of running it themselves.

Yes. And at that point, it wouldn't be a guess for those people because we have contracts that go out two or three years at a time. So depending on the contract period, they would have a pretty good idea of what they would be getting for their salary increases.

And my I just have from your report, we could probably find out how many people right now of just how many this would affect who's going to be That

would not be 52 with 25.

Correct.

Because that's the people it's going to affect.

It's going to

probably create years

of service.

I know I'm going through two scenarios here.

And each

one, I'll probably say, let's assume 100% take it. Let's assume 50% take it. This really likely benefits the city more than the member. This is one of these cases where the member is probably more interested in the 10.6 pay raise. And they might end up hurting themselves by giving up

short term for the long term.

Yeah. But ballpark, we talked on five guys, seven guys. I'm just roughly thinking in my head the 26 guys that are working. I know everybody, but I don't know what their exact age and how It's

50%. It would be five to 10 people, I'm thinking. It's not that many.

The five-three scenario helps the members. There's no doubt. Because they keep getting what they were going to get. So the 5.3 scenario, the city ends up paying for it. The free scenario, where the member goes to zero, likely, in my opinion, helps the city.

Think that's We would

have to draw ask Paul to come up with some official wording of what it takes to do this hard freeze or a soft freeze? And just saying, twenty eight point five, if a guy goes, I'm going to wait till thirty point five or thirty two point five years.

So I think all of that would have to be done, but only at the point of having a study done and presenting that to or having that available for the city or the union.

And if they decide to

argument, they would argue the ordinance or how they want to implement it, right? We would just provide some information for them, some background.

Would it be like in addition to an article in the contract, Paul, if this did get approved?

Say that one more time, please.

Would it be in addition to a collective bargaining agreement language or it would be an ordinance change if this were to take effect?

Or both? It would require the union and the city to reach an agreement, that agreement to be ratified. It It doesn't have to be an article. It often is an article or section of the contract. It doesn't have to be. Parties can agree to have a separate agreement that didn't there's no magic about it's gotta be in this contract book as an as an article, but it requires the city and the union to agree. And then once they reach an agreement that's ratified by the members and ratified by the city commission, we would draft the ordinance for the city to consider, and then the city is obligated to enact that ordinance.

It would operate just like how we did the eight year the increase to drop recently that they had the agreement with the ordinance. Okay.

I hope that answered the question. I don't think it'd be too wordy.

No. Thank you, Paul.

Any further questions or ideas, concepts?

Don't start when you're so young. That's all you can do. Got to find the perfect

Got to find the perfect gauge and start working. Okay. A time machine.

Actually, Tim, you did make a motion, correct? That's what I put in my notes. Maybe not No,

I asked if we needed a motion.

Oh, asked. Okay. Sorry.

The

chair would entertain a motion if somebody is inclined to conduct this case study or study as presented.

I'll second that motion.

No, I was asking for a motion. You're asking? Yeah.

Okay. I'll go ahead and make the motion.

So we have the

motion? We have. Doug, run the numbers and get back with us.

Okay. Do we have a second? Second.

All right.

That was to conduct a study at 5%.

Yes, the study is presented yesterday. All right. We have a motion and a second. All in favor?

Aye.

Motion carries.

All right.

Mr. Chairman, looking at the remainder of the agenda, I think my work may be complete for today. May I be so bold to ask to be excused at this point. If you think you might need me, I'd be happy to say if you might have.

All right.

Does anybody have calls for him to remain on the call?

No. Thank you, Paul.

Thank you very much, Paul.

Okay. I mean, listen, if something comes up and you have a burning question, just call me or text me. I think you guys have my cell number. I know Christy doesn't. If you need anything, just call me, but I am mindful that my time is your money, too.

We appreciate it. Thank you very much.

Thank you so much, everybody.

Take care.

Okay. Take care, everybody. Thank you.

See you.

Okay. Moving on to consent agenda.

Oh, very exciting. Okay. So page 182 in your electronic tablets, if you need to wake it up, there's a code in the top right corner of the agenda that I prepared. It's in the main packet. Of course, there is the main packet and the valuations. Go down to 182. Not a ton of bills paid over the quarter, And but here they then the fund activity report is the other component of the consent agenda, which just has the oh, yeah, we paid out the remaining balance for John Wallagora's drop. He was in the net of fees interest earning options. We had to wait for the balance to be final before we could pay out the rest of his drop account. So he's on there.

Of course, Victor Cleveland is on there, and also, you know, the the benefits set up for his his widow, Amy. I've sent her the share plan paperwork in the mail. I haven't had it returned yet, so that has not been distributed. But I plan to follow-up with her and just make sure she has no questions and everything's good. But it was about $60,000 so big decision. Sure she's thinking about what to do with it and how to deploy that. And then the thirteenth checks are in a separate exhibit, so the very last page. Really not much to see. The check amounts were pretty good, just the gross, the taxes in the middle, and the net. Beneficiaries got 50%, which is why you can see a couple of them were different.

And Ralph Longoria somehow was missed in the prior year, which is why his is larger than the rest. And that must have been my bad. So sorry to Ralph, but he did get the money that was him. So are there any questions about any of the invoices that have been paid? There are no new invoices or the fund activity report. If not, we just need a motion to approve.

Motion to approve the consent agenda as presented by Chrissy.

We have a motion. Do we have a second? Second. We have a motion and second. All in favor?

Aye.

Board moves to approve the consent agenda.

All

right. Christie, you're still up?

State annual report. So it's due in two days. And you just approved your actual expenses today. So that'll be uploaded to the annual report submission. The audit was just approved. That will be added to the annual report submission. I actually think you guys are gonna be my first client to be approved this year. So, everything's in good order, and, no questions or concerns or anything. So that's all good news. Then the education opportunities, you guys know if you want to go to something, just reach out. Have you guys seen the survey yet from Jamie? Does that sound familiar, like a survey before FPPTA? Because Scott, I So know you basically, Jamie Arthur. It's J A M M I E. So it kind of looks like Jammie.

But Jamie is the analyst or my support person on this plan. He's the one that you correspond with if you're traveling or getting reimbursements. You may have spoken to him for other reasons as well. But I've learned from our analyst team that FPPTA is asking more and more questions during the registration process, things that we don't know how to answer for you. You know, do you have food allergies? Are you bringing guests? Do you want to go to water the bamboo or whatever? You know, there's all kinds of things and we don't know how to answer those questions for you. So the analyst team came up with this survey. And what I'm told is that they are not registering anyone for FPPTA events until you have completed the survey.

So I just wanted to put that out there so you guys are on the lookout for this survey. It's going to come from Jamie, not from me. I try my best not to have anything to do with travel and reimbursements because it's just there's so much back and forth. But hopefully the survey cuts down on some of that. Now if you haven't done the survey and you've told me that you want to be registered, I told Jamie that I just I want him to register you as best he can right there on the spot. If we need to call you and have you answer the questions, we will. But just be on the lookout for it just in case. You guys, I know you like to go to the annual conference. Anyone going this year?

I'm considering the June to 07/01/2001.

I want go for training. Okay.

Alright. So annual. That was Scott, Howard.

I eat out. I'm all the time today.

Teri, okay. Tim?

When is it? I'm sorry.

June 28 through July 1. Now, so the annual conference for FPPTA, the board has a membership, so you can go. The annual conference is it's, like, basically a big exhibit hall. All the vendors are there with booths and giveaways, and, you know, we smile and wave, and it's the worst for us. But it's really fun for you.

Yeah. Sorry. Be out

of town for that.

Scott, you know. I don't it's not my favorite place to be because it's just it's it's it's exhausting. You know? The the the hall closes, everyone's like, alright. Time to go to dinner and drinks. And I'm like but, it it's a good it's a good, it's a good show, and there are some speakers. Right? Like, you can learn

some stuff.

Out of the few days, you usually get some good speakers that I talk on.

There's no doubt it's a good ROI, but I gotta pass this year.

Okay. Yeah. And then, I mean, the schools are great. So come September, if you wanna check one of those out, this

is

something that I list on on my section all the time. So

Hey, Christian. Yes. I have stuff from Jimmy, but not at the survey. No survey at all comes through.

Just checked it. Okay.

I don't

think I got it either. I usually

I just got to put

a whole list with Jimmy. Nothing.

I got but I don't remember. I remember it was talking about a survey, but I didn't do it. I just kind of

deleted it. And I may have deleted it. Now I will. So I There's nothing there

from him.

There's there's stuff I know. We work really well together. So if I told him on stuff so, you know, I send out my my post meeting action items, right? And if I tell him to do something, he's going to do it. The problem we've run into, though and you guys are very responsible. You communicate with us, there's no issues. But we definitely have people who will say in, you know, let's say March, I definitely want to go. Oh, I'm going. Sign me up. Do this and that. A month and a half later, you know, when you can't get a refund, they go, I can't go anymore. Cancel me. Then we have to undo everything. And it's just a lot of it's a burden. It's a headache.

And sometimes the plan does lose money by, you know, half of the registration fee. So we're doing our best to get you guys signed up and reimbursed as promptly as we can, but it's dance. It's a dance. But if you guys ever need anything or something's not happening fast enough, text me, call me. If you don't have my cell phone number, I'll give it to you. Please don't ever give it to members, but you are trustees. You can have it. And that's all I have today. And I will send Kyle Dent his draft application today.

Okay. Fantastic. All right.

Jared, if you don't