Meet the man who helped create one of the best public pension plans in America
May 7, 2019 by Sunny Oh
As 80-year old Gary Gates trundles along the streets of Wisconsin’s capital on a bike half his age, he stops at dumpsters to pick up cans.
It’s a habit the former head of Wisconsin’s public pension fund has kept up for decades. In the first year of his retirement, 30 years ago, Gates collected and recycled around 250,000 cans — a record haul he ascribed to his need to keep his hands busy. Since he was a child at the beach picking up refuse left by other vacationers, he said it has been a perennial itch.
These traits — being disciplined and public-minded — encapsulate Wisconsin’s approach to managing the pensions of government employees, and helps explain why Gates was one of the people who helped design the Wisconsin pension fund in its modern form. He and others turned it into the home of the only state pension plan capable of fully delivering on its retirement pledges to schoolteachers, firefighters and other government employees.
“Wisconsin by the numbers is among the five best funded systems in the country, but what sets it apart even further is just how thoughtful the state has been on paying what has come due, and in laying out policies that plan for the future. In that regard, it’s as good as it gets for a state-run public pension system,” said Greg Mennis, director of public sector retirement systems project at the Pew Charitable Trusts.
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