My Observations of the February 9, 2012 Police Pension Board Meeting

This time, my video recorder worked so you will be able to see and hear the entire contents of this pension board meeting and I will not have to delete it when the next video is produced.  Because the audio file provides better audio quality of our meetings than the video does, I shall also include a link to that audio file at the end of each months report as I have ALWAYS done in the past.

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This pension board meeting started with only our Chairman, Bruce Moore, being absent.  In his place, he appointed Ms. Lenehan, the City Treasurer, to sit as our chairperson.  Also present were City Director Joan Adcock and our regular pension board advisors as well as our pension administrative staff.

Some of the issues discussed during this pension board meeting included, but were not limited to, the following topics that you can now watch for yourself:

1. The report of our Financial Advisors, at 00.01.56 into the video;
2. The change of the meeting date for our pension board meetings, at 00.28.33 into the video;
3. The report from our Lobbyist, at 00.34.56 into the video;
4. The report of our Funding Committee, at 00.50.35 into the video;
5. The report from the Secretary, at 01.25.15 into the video;
6. The Report from the Treasurer, at 01.29.58 into the video;
7. The issue of Ms. Lenehan’s August 3^rd email, at 01.50.23 into the video; and
8. Ms. Adcock thanking me for the article I published on this website about her, at 02.09.00 into the video.

In the interest of brevity, I shall only comment on the issue of Ms. Lenehan’s August 3^rd email that has lingered on this website and on our board’s agenda for the past six months since our August 11, 2011 pension board meeting.  Because that issue has been “kicked down the road” so many times by the City and your Board, I believe it is necessary to refresh your memories about this issue because the effect of using this tactic, as is common among defense attorneys with clients facing criminal charges, means your memory may be dimed and this issue may no longer seem important due to the passage of time.  For that same reason, I have also included several short audio clips of comments, generally under one mintue each, made during the past several pension board meetings concerning this issue for your review.

Some of you may recall that I did not report “My Observations” of our August pension board meeting and instead only submitted an article explaining my reasons for not reporting on that meeting that you can review again HERE.  What I did not say in that article was that this particular issue was a primary reason for my failure to file that report because of my strong disagreement with the methods our board apparently wanted to employ in their effort to obtain a merger with LOPFI with a cost of living adjustment.  While that is undoubtedly an excellent objective that I strongly support, it quickly became clear to me during that meeting that a majority of your board, led by Farris, believed that our Board must make certain concessions to city government in an effort to foster their good will and support for the attainment of that goal while I believed that some concessions were not only unnecessary but also unwise for that purpose and that this issue was one of those instances.

Whatever you may think about the wisdom of the Board attempting to reserve funds for disbursement in this matter, the fact that this Board had the legal right to make that determination should be clear as that right is spelled out under A.C.A. § 24-11-405(c) that states, in pertinent part, “The board shall have the absolute control and management of the funds provided for in this subchapter” that includes all the assets within our pension fund.  That right is further aplified in A.C.A. § 24-11-411(b) that states in pertinent part, “no warrant [or check] shall be drawn except by order of the board.”  However in this particular instance, our Treasurer did not follow that statutory guidance and instead, took it upon herself to “veto” the majority action of this board as you can listen to our attorney explain HERE during our September pension board meeting that was reported HERE.

During that same pension board meeting, I reported my belief that I had found a workable solution to that problem and made a motion that our Board simply check into that possible solution for the reasons you can listen to HERE.  However, due to the other Board members obvious desire to simply ignore this issue as a concession to the City, it soon became apparent that only Don Wood and I supported it so I withdrew my motion from further consideration.  Then in our October pension board meeting, as is reported HERE, Don Wood again brought that solution back up after our board learned that Ms. Lenehan was no longer waiting on the City Attorney’s opinion and was now only waiting on an opinion from her CPA licensing authority but that motion was defeated for the same reasons that prompted me to withdrawn it in the previous meeting.  Consequently, I reported that I had finally given up on achieving that solution in the last paragraph of that article.

After our Board was declared by the PRB to no longer be a “projected insolvent fund,” which was the excuse I had most feared the City would use to deny a portion of our pension benefits, I mentioned in both the December and January pension board meetings that “this issue could be laid to rest, as far as I was concerned,” because I saw no assistance coming from our Board for any solution to that problem.  However, after making that statement in our January pension board meeting, Farris later claimed that he still had concerns about this matter that caused me to believe that some alternate solution to that problem may be possible.  Listen to Farris’ statement about his concerns HERE and my subsequent agreement with those concerns HERE to decide for yourself, if that belief was unfounded.

For those reasons during this pension board meeting, I again brought Ms. Lenehan’s email of August 3^rd before our Board by stating [01.50.23 into the pension board video]:

During our last pension board meeting, that our Treasurer did not attend, our Chairman presented this board with a letter from our Treasurer’s licensing authority, that our Board did not have sufficient time to review during that meeting, and stated it was his hope that this letter would finally allow this issue to be laid to rest.  However, that letter did not provide any explanation for our Treasurer’s actions in this matter nor did it provide any response to Farris’ valid concerns that he expressed during our last pension board meeting when he stated [see his obvious discomfort with this quote in the video] that Ms. Lenehan and Mr. Moore had “arbitrarily . . . undermined the authority of this Board to approve expenditures” by their actions in this matter.  In my opinion, that statement by Farris clearly indicated his belief, as well as my own, that this matter involved the basic right of our pension membership to control their pension funds, as exercised through this Board, that is statutorily protected under A.C.A. § 24-11-405(c) that states, in pertinent part, “The board shall have the absolute control and management of the funds provided for in this subchapter” that includes all the assets within our pension fund.

More importantly, under Robert’s Rules of Order that were approved and adopted by this Board in the March 2010 pension board meeting and are now binding on our determinations in all cases [RONR(10th ed.) p16, ll. 8-11], those rules clearly state, “Rules [or statutes] protecting . . . a basic right of the individual member cannot be suspended, even by unanimous consent or an actual unanimous vote” [RONR (10th ed.) p255, ll. 13-15].  For that reason, if our Treasurer’s actions in this matter “suspended” the statutorily protected authority of this Board for whatever reasons, those actions would constitute a violation of that Rule that this Board cannot simply ignore.

Therefore, because this issue involves a basic right of our membership that this Board does not have the authority to simply ignore and no vote of this Board was ever obtained on this important issue during our last pension board meeting, I have placed this issue back on our Agenda so that our Treasurer may finally have the opportunity to explain her actions in this matter to our Board so that it may finally resolve this issue in accordance with Robert’s Rules of Order. 

After I read that statement, Ms. Lenehan asked what I would like her to do and I eventually replied that I simply wanted her “sincere assurances that her actions, as those actions were represented in her August 3^rd email, will never occur again in the future.”  However, Ms. Lenehan would not provide such assurance and stated she could not provide assurances for whatever I “dreamed up”; however, my request was quite specific and only pertained to her actions as they were indicated in her August 3^rd email.

Farris spoke [01.55.55 into the video] and attempted to “walk back” his statement made during the previous pension board meeting by claiming that our Board and the City are “getting along now” and “accomplishing things now” that was a consideration in his determination that we should simply ignore this issue.  However, it is a simple matter to “get along” with someone you constantly agree with and we have actually accomplished very little for our membership that would not have been possible by also protecting our memberships’ rights.  Farris then claims that our own attorney’s opinion on this matter, when we asked him if we could spend those funds, was basically, “Yes but, it could be problematic.”  However, that is a response that any attorney would provide to a client because no attorney wants to answer a client’s question without providing a warning of the possible ramifications that may be involved in today’s litigious society but that warning does not mean that those possible ramifications should be considered a certainty.  Finally, Farris mentioned that in the past 25 years, whenever our fund told the City to “cut the checks or we’re going to court” they have simply written the checks.  However, there would have been no need to threaten the City with court action or even obtain it in such cases had our fund simply obtained the services of a custodian for our pension fund, as I had previously suggested during our September pension board meeting.

Later, after Sara and I had further discussed this issue, Farris again spoke [at 02.06.23 into the video] quoting my previous statement that this issue could be laid to rest, which I have already explained was made before Farris caused me to believe that a resolution to this matter may be possible, and that he is “tired of fussing and feuding over absolutely everything that comes down the pike.”  He further mentioned our desire to provide our membership with some type of “benefit increase” and the merger of our fund with LOPFI with a COLA and again stated, as he had in his previous statement, that “this thing is not important because we can address it, if it ever comes up.”  

I agree that the City and our Board seem to be getting along better simply because we now usually agree with whatever they say and I certainly agree with the goals of providing our membership with some type of “supplement increase,” but not a “benefit increase” as none is possible from the PRB as was mentioned by Farris HERE, and a merger with LOPFI.  However, I disagree that this issue is “not important” or is simply some issue that “comes down the pike” because this issue clearly involves the basic rights of our membership that may require some “fussing and feuding” to preserve those rights.  Certainly, it is far easier to simply ignore those rights and move on with other business as this Board has chosen to do in this instance.  However, your representatives were not elected to always take the easy path but instead to foremost preserve your rights.  If this situation ever did “come up” again, as it already did on August 3^rd of last year, it could mean that someone this Board had agreed to pay may not receive a Board authorized payment simply because of a dissenting vote cast by the City Manager or City Treasurer and such an action would clearly infringe upon those rights. 

Of course as Farris claimed, we could always seek a court injunction if that ever happened; however, seeking such an injunction would undoubtedly cost our fund money and conciderable time because the ruling of a court would probably take months or longer as was confirmed by our legal counsel in his response to that very question from me, asked in our September pension board meeting that you can listen to HERE.  Thus, the fact that this incident obviously did happen and could happen again, without any consequences as has now been proven, was reason enough for me to request that our board eliminate the current need to obtain any additional approval from the City Manager and the City Treasurer on such Board authorized expenditures in the future by simply choosing to establish a “custodian” for our fund, as is authorized by law [A.C.A. § 24-11-411(c)].

In my opinion, the MOST important job of any representative on your pension board is to protect your rights at ALL times and not simply ignore them for whatever reasons.  In this instance, I believe your Board’s decision, while well intentioned, was terribly misguided and represents a “slippery slope” that our pension membership should have a right to avoid; however, that right has now regrettably been shredded by your pension board representatives.  Thus, our membership can now only hope that such circumstances will never occur again in the future but, just as we have learned from the promised “hope and change” on the national stage, such hope is often fleeting.

Listen to the Audio of this Pension Board Meeting HERE

View the Video of this Pension Board Meeting HERE