One of the little-noticed shames of the 2002 state elections was the way the Treasurer’s race got shifted from the issues at stake to a personality contest based on a cute-kid advertising campaign. For Tim Cahill did stand for something: a more aggressive role of the Treasurer in the investment decisions of the pension fund. Now he is making a move to increase his role in the fund’s management, by sacking its executive director in favor of one of his own choices, and the Globe’s Steve Bailey is calling him on it.
The fund has prospered in part because the last two treasurers — O’Brien and Joe Malone — were smart enough to know what they didn’t know. Both let their professional staff and advisers run the fund.
Now, however, is the time to worry about our $28 billion pension fund. It is time to worry when two nonpartisan A-players like Jack Meyer, chief of Harvard University’s endowment, and Allan Bufferd, his counterpart at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, walk away from the pension fund because they don’t like what they see happening under our new treasurer, Tim Cahill.
…Cahill says he will be more hands-on with the pension fund than either Malone or O’Brien because of his six years running the Norfolk County pension fund. “I’ll put my record up against anyone,” says Cahill, 44. Consider: From 1983 to 1995, Cahill ran Handshakes Cafe in Quincy Center. Later he was a courier, delivering packages, until he was elected county treasurer in 1997. He was a Quincy city councilor for 15 years.
Meyer and Bufferd oversee two of the nation’s largest college endowments, together totaling $26 billion. Treasurer Tim ran the $336 million Norfolk County pension fund and made a terrific chicken and broccoli behind the Handshakes counter. Whom would you trust with the state’s $28 billion pension fund?
A cheap shot, to be sure. But Cahill’s hubris is breathtaking - and dangerous. If there’s one area in need of technocratic, apolitical oversight, its the state pension fund.
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