So we'll call it to order the October 29th employee, Montgomery County Employees Retirement Board meeting.

Note the presence of all members of retirement board.

I'm going to ask Dennis DeSanto to lead us in the pledge.

Okay.

Alan, we don't have any public comment, do we?

Okay.

Quickly.

All right.

No public comment moving on to the approval of the minutes.

I'd like to make a motion to approve the minutes from the last uh retirement board meeting on July 16th.

Um is there a second?

Second.

Second by controller hard.

And then I'll turn it over to our CFO.

Thank you.

Uh just a few uh comments before we get started with the um presentation from SCI.

We're on schedule to uh complete our contribution, the county's contribution to the pension plan.

It's gonna be a total of 32.5 million dollars by the end of the year.

That'll be 100% of the contribution contribution that's required for 2025.

And this will be our fifth year to um contribute 100% to the plan.

Also, I just wanted to know real quick.

I sent out a report uh via email, and those that are in the room have a hard copy, uh is put out by the market um group.

And basically it's it's pretty really good information.

It's a comparison of county pension plans here in Pennsylvania.

Um, so it gives you some really good statistical information.

Um, this was updated as of 2024.

Um, and they do this every year, so we'll continue to get this.

But uh if you have any questions after you read through the information, just reach out with that.

You guys make books.

You have you have a thank you.

Sure.

How are you?

I'm doing great.

How are you guys today?

Good to see you.

Hello to those online.

So if you could start the presentation kindly on um the executive summary.

One more page, please.

Well, good afternoon.

I'm happy to report good news today.

Um seems like the markets, nothing can shrug off a really strong market.

We're hitting new records today.

Um, you can see on the executive summary here, we started the year at 652 million, and we ended the quarter at 734 million.

And as of yesterday, the plan is up to 748 million.

So it's really been a fantastic year for the portfolio.

The third quarter, the portfolio earned a 5.43%.

And year to date, your performance is 13.54.

And it's interesting, you know, we talked about your goals with Cola and what's needed for the plan, you know, the volatile year that we entered into with Liberation Day.

It's quite remarkable to see that return of 13.5% and even higher, kind of given that the market is still rallying.

Um, last year you had 11.7%.

So you beat returns of last year, and then uh 2023 it was 15%.

So as we continue to get rid of that 2022 year, that was the strong negative year.

This will certainly help in a number of measurements that you're looking forward to.

You can see that the uh portfolio earned 87.8 million a year to date through through um September 30th.

And just to put things in perspective, I always like to give a high-level summary of the asset classes.

You can see equities here, big responsibility as far as the current earns earnings that you did for 13.5%.

Equities were up over 19%.

And really, we started, you know, we started strong gains despite you think of all the headwinds with um tariffs with geopolitical issues or the government shutdown.

What we're seeing is strong corporate earnings.

Uh, we're saw an aggressive federal reserve and start cutting rates in September.