After posting the worst returns of any retirement system in Massachusetts, the retirement board that handles pension investments for many local town and school workers closed out 2008 by rewarding its staff with a stunning 5.8 percent raise.
The Essex Regional Retirement Board's Executive Director Timothy Bassett's income jumped to $137,250 in 2009. Chief Operating Officer Lilli Gilligan's salary reached $85,566. Retirement Coordinator Cynthia Sweeney earned $73,836 in the 10 months before her October 2009 retirement.
Overall, staff salaries at the beleaguered board soared from $502,134 in 2008 to $579,606 in 2009.
Locally, the regional board represents the towns of Salisbury, Merrimac, Georgetown, Groveland, Rowley, Newbury and West Newbury and two regional school districts, Pentucket and Triton. In November, under heavy pressure from its member towns, it stopped managing retirement funds and transferred control to the state.
The details became public this week — more than a year after the fact — when the retirement board finally released its list of staff and salaries, along with minutes of meetings, that they had resolutely refused to allow the public to see. The information was obtained by The Salem News, a sister paper of The Daily News, after months of wrangling with the board over requests for information under the public records law.
While the U.S. economy was in free fall and workers faced layoffs and foreclosures, Essex Retirement Board members were handing out generous raises. At a meeting on Dec. 18, 2008, the board approved the 2009 budget, which included a 5.8 percent raise, which they indicated was based on the Social Security cost-of-living adjustment.
That final meeting of 2008 capped a year in which the board's investments suffered a loss of 33 percent — the worst of the 107 retirement systems in Massachusetts.
Neither Bassett nor Gilligan returned messages seeking comment.
Previously, Gilligan has said the board learned of the dismal investment numbers in early 2009 and responded by firing one of its fund managers. Minutes of the meetings show that the board had third-quarter reports in the fall and discussed the final numbers for the year on Jan. 16.
Member communities in the retirement system did not learn how bad the numbers were until The Salem News published a story about it in June 2008. Since then, the board has agreed, under pressure from member communities, to transfer its investment assets to the state system, a process that is ongoing.
The minutes hold other revelations about the board.
One board member — Kathy O'Leary — was absent for 10 of the 18 meetings for which minutes were made available. For most of that year and a half, she participated in the meetings by telephone. She still collected her full $3,000 salary for serving on the retirement board. O'Leary did not return a message seeking comment.
Bassett, meanwhile, has a history of charging hundreds of dollars a month in expenses to the board. In the nine-month period between April and December of 2008, for example, Bassett was paid an additional $2,768 in expenses — an average of a little more than $300 a month. The minutes do not detail what the charges were for, and Bassett has not responded to requests for comment.
Reviewing the minutes, it can be difficult for anyone to tell what actually happened at the meetings. The minutes regularly record that members discussed a certain topic but don't give any indication of what was said about it. So it would be impossible to tell, for example, how board members reacted in November 2008 when they received a report on their third-quarter investment results. The minutes don't reflect what the results were or what members said about them.
That is perhaps not surprising from a board that spent thousands of dollars in legal fees trying to prevent the public from getting information about them.
The Salem News obtained the board list of staff salaries and meeting minutes from 2008 and 2009, months after submitting two separate requests under the state's public records law.
Both requests were made in early June. On July 17, an attorney from the Boston-based firm of Morgan, Brown & Joy responded, claiming that processing the request would carry a price tag of $420.63. The figure included the total cost of searching for and copying the records as well as "redacting information which is exempt from disclosure," according to the firm.
Two different law firms handled the request for the board.
In the end, the board agreed to produce the information at a reduced cost — $170.99 — but charged a rate of $28.81 per hour — the hourly wage of the lowest-paid employee capable of performing the task, according to the board.
Parts of the minutes themselves have been redacted in an apparent attempt to protect the names of public employees who have been granted accidental disability pensions.
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