2022-12-19 Retirement Board Minutes

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2026 < MINUTES OF THE READING RETIREMENT BOARD MEETING Monday December 19, 2022 The Reading Retirement Board held a regular session meeting on December 19, 2022 in The Conference Room at 2 Haven Street, Unit 307, Reading, Massachusetts The meeting was called to order at 9:30 AM by Vice -Chair Carol Roberts with board members Sharon Angstrom, Robert Beck, John Halsey, Administrator Colleen Loughlin, Assistant Administrator Elaine Kelly, Laura Strickland from PRIT and Anthony Tranghese from Fiducient Advisors. Chairman David Gentile was unable to attend. SPECIAL ITEMS • Laura Strickland from PRIM and Anthony Tranghese from Fiducient Advisors attended and presented updates to the Board. Laura reported that it is certainly a different environment than the last Board presentation in 2021 with FY2021 returns proving to be record high, with FY2022 proving to be the weakest market since the global financial crisis over 13 years ago. PRIT fund did continue to outperform although it was down 3%, outperforming the benchmark by about 2%. PRIT fund has constructed to do well and PRIM is pleased with the long-term resiliency of the portfolio. Laura left the meeting at 10:00 AM. Anthony presented an update of the plan through November, including performance and asset allocation. This calendar year has proven to be a challenging one across markets, with broad fixed income and equity markets posting double digit losses to date. In reviewing the asset allocation, Fiducient discussed the flexibility with PRIT sleeves to potentiallymake some adjustments in the future in an effort to continue to align the asset mix with the objectives of the plan. Fiducient will plan to discuss this in more detail at their next Board presentation, likely in the first half of 2023. Anthony Tranghese left the meeting at 10:30 AM • Discussion regarding a 5% Local COLA option. This act provides the local retirement systems with a local option to increase the Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) for Fiscal Year 2023 to up to 5% on the base amount. The approval of the increase can occur at any time during the fiscal year and will take effect as of July 1, 2022. The Administrator contacted the Board's Actuary at KMS to inquire as to whether they could do a cost valuation to decide how to proceed. This would need to be presented at Town Meeting in the Spring of 2023. Linda Boumival from KMS Actuaries joined in on a conference call to help clarify what this entails and to help the Board members better understand what needs to be done in order to accomplish this . for the retirees. There are concerns that given the timeframe this may be hard to achieve however, the Administrator will supply the required information to Linda Boumival in mid-January, after j closing out 2022. Linda will then prepare an estimated cost value for the Board to approve or deny. .J