Date: June 9, 2026
Time: 11:00 AM – 11:10 AM
Location: City Hall Conference Room 503 and via Zoom
Chair: (Acting chair, Mayor Whitting absent)
The Fire Pension Board met to approve the agenda, minutes, financial report, and pension calculations. A key discussion centered on state legislative efforts to transfer local fire pension management to the state Department of Retirement Systems (DRS), with board members expressing concern about potential loss of city funding.
Time is 1101, and I will call the meeting to order by our pension board. Um, again, just for the record, Mayor Whitting wasn't able to attend today's meeting and's asked me to sit in and chair the next yeah. Uh so the first item on the agenda is approval of the agenda. Is there a motion to approve? ISO move I second. All is in favor. I mean consideration of the March 12th, 2026 minutes. I wasn't here selling that. The only thing I saw is Marlon's name is spelled wrong, M-A-R-L-Y-N-S. Oh, yeah. I missed that. When I was looking that fixed. Well, when you write somebody's name in the logbook for a lot of meetings. You remember how it's spelled. In fact, I looked at that board. Who's that? Yes. So once we fix that spelling error is there a motion to approve the minutes with the correction of the spelling error. I still move. I'll second. All those in favor? I have our financial update, financial report as of March 31st, 2026. Take it away, Barber. Which is essentially the same as the financial report was at the last meeting. Um as of the time that I prepared this report, we have not had not received the fire insurance premium tax from the state yet. I believe that normally comes either in later May or June. So I will know what that is. Um probably for the next meeting, but I'm estimating that it'll be about the same amount that it was last year, 93,000. Anyway, we're doing well with cash. Um looking to be at about $900,000 balance at the end of the year. I have zero concerns with anything with the fund. One note that I will make is under the professional services, we plan on spending about 12,000 um on an actuarial study. We're required to do one every other year, and this is the year that work is underway. Um, I just don't have the the final report yet. And fingers crossed, uh, perhaps for the September meeting that we would have that. Well, I'd like to make one comment on that. Over at the left conference every year, we always have a presentation by somebody from DRS, and also we have a financial update from the auditor's office, uh, Matt Smith. And of course, one of the big topics over there this year was the House bill that took the money out of the pension fund. And the select committee on pension policies in Olympia is meeting, and they've been asked by I think it was the association of Washington Cities and the Association of Washington Counties to take over the pension fund to have DRS take it over. And there was a lot of questions. His pension fund? Yes. Okay. Take over all of the pensions and have the determination on medical bills and stuff, which now is done by our local left board. And one of the questions that was asked is they said, Well, wait a minute, if the state takes that over, are you going to keep giving us the benefit from the fire pension and the property taxes? And without hesitation, both of them answered yes, we're going to take that money back. So it's something I wish the mayor was here that he should, you know, might be aware of. In my perception of my personal perception only, there's an awful lot of people down in Olympia that are really don't understand pension systems and how they work. And there was a lot of people that were really surprised when the question was asked because they weren't aware of the fact that the cities get so much money. And when you're talking about Tacoma, Seattle spoke can Vancouver that's a big chunk of money.