James Brekk

When I first walked through LACERA's doors in 1992, I came to build something important. Some of you may remember that era — the floppy disk, WordPerfect, the green-glow computer terminals. My job was to design and install LACERA's first local-area network: the servers, the computers, the early e-mail, and the connections that would one day calculate and deliver the monthly pension payments so many of us now depend upon. Even then, I knew this work would reach into every part of LACERA, and before long, almost nothing the institution did happened without it. Two years later, LACERA asked me to stay and manage what I had built. I accepted, and I never left. For nearly three decades, LACERA was not simply where I worked. It was work I valued, in service of a mission I believed in: to produce, protect, and provide the promised benefits so that, in their golden years, our members could enjoy a secure and dignified retirement.

Today, I am asking for your vote to continue that service from a different seat — as your retiree representative, the Eighth Member of the LACERA Board of Investments.

Let me tell you why this seat matters so much, because it is easy to overlook. Most of us spent our working years focused on the task in front of us, not on the fund standing behind our retirement. Yet that fund is the reason our benefits arrive, reliably, month after month, for the rest of our lives. Here is a fact every retiree should know: LACERA's investment earnings provide approximately seventy cents of every dollar required to pay our benefits. Our own contributions and the County's are essential, too, but it is the disciplined performance and prudent stewardship of LACERA's investments that ultimately keeps the promise whole for generations to come. Today those investments total more than $91 billion across the trusts LACERA manages, the largest county retirement system in the nation.

The Board of Investments governs that engine. The Board does not pick individual investments; it sets the strategy, approves the asset allocation, hires and holds accountable the professionals and firms who carry out the strategy, and applies steady judgment to every proposal placed before it — challenging assumptions and resisting any pressure to use the fund for purposes other than the retirees' financial security. It is the single most important safeguard of our lifelong financial security. And it is no place to learn on the job.

That conviction is at the heart of my candidacy, because of all the ways a candidate might ask for your trust, I can offer you something I believe is genuinely rare: no one understands LACERA more completely.

Over a career spent entirely at LACERA, in service of retirees, I rose from a line supervisor to become LACERA's first Chief Information Security Officer, then Chief Information Officer, and finally Interim Deputy Chief Executive Officer. Technology runs through every part of LACERA: the investments operations, accounting, benefits administration, cybersecurity, and the very systems that put your check in your account. The person responsible for all of it cannot stay in one lane. To be effective in those roles, I had to understand how all the parts of LACERA fit together and, increasingly, to help shape where the institution was headed. By the time I served as Interim Deputy Chief Executive Officer, I was helping lead the whole enterprise, not one department of it. That is precisely the work this board does — setting direction, entrusting execution to the most capable experts, and holding them accountable. I sat in the rooms where LACERA's most consequential decisions were made, and I was also there when those decisions were carried out. I intimately understand not only the Investments boardroom but also the back office that makes everything work.

Experience like this is more than a résumé; it is memory. I lived LACERA's history. I was in the room for decisions that shaped this fund, and I understand not just what we decided but why — the trade-offs weighed, the lessons learned, the reasons behind the rules LACERA operates under today. Boards make better decisions when someone present remembers how we got here, and when a hard question returns in a new form, as such questions often do, it helps to have a member who has seen it before. No one else in this race carries that history, because no one else lived it.

Those who have represented us in the past have brought real strengths — in law, accounting, healthcare, and the markets. I bring something different: command of the whole enterprise, not just a single corner of it. That command is what allows me to ask the sharp questions, recognize the real risk, and hold management accountable to us, the retirees.

Let me be concrete about what that has meant in practice. I helped build and automate the very system that delivers your monthly pension payment. As LACERA's first Chief Information Security Officer, I was responsible for the safeguards protecting our investment operations, our financial transactions, and the sensitive information the fund holds in trust — the kind of enterprise and operational risk oversight that sits squarely in this board's lane; we protected it without a compromise.

Here is something many retirees never hear: LACERA does not invest only our pension. It also manages a second, entirely separate trust — one dedicated to retiree healthcare. It is called OPEB (Other Post-Employment Benefits), better known as the Retiree Healthcare Trust, and the same Board of Investments governs it alongside the pension fund. I helped build and fund that trust. As Interim Deputy Chief Executive Officer, I sat at the strategy and implementation table where the County committed to a plan to begin depositing real money into it and put it to work for retirees. Today it holds roughly $5 billion, beside our $86 billion pension fund — about $91 billion in all. That is worth pausing on: the seat I am seeking governs that healthcare trust as well as our pensions. Protecting your healthcare is not a side issue in this race; it is a key part of the job.

I serve you now as a member of the RELAC Board of Directors, where I chair the Investments, Finance, Audit, and Budget Committee as well as the Information Technology Oversight Committee. Let me be clear and candid about that: I am a director of RELAC and a candidate for this LACERA Board seat, and I am grateful for RELAC's endorsement and the encouragement of those who know my work. My case to you rests on my record, not on any title.

If you elect me, my commitments can be summed up in five pillars I will return to again and again: Fiduciary. Stewardship. Experience. Independence. Retirees First.

Above all, Retirees First, because that is the entire point. My service to the retirees of Los Angeles County has been continuous and uninterrupted, and protecting our benefits, including the retiree healthcare so many of us rely on, is, to me, a permanent mandate, not a part-time interest.

We earned these benefits across decades of public service — in hospitals and courtrooms, on patrol and in the field, behind the desks and counters all across this County. The promise made to us in return is one worth defending with everything we have. I would be deeply honored to help defend it on your behalf.

I respectfully ask for your vote for the Eighth Member of the LACERA Board of Investments. I am here to serve you. My door, and my inbox, are always open.

With gratitude and respect,
James Brekk
Retired, LACERA · Director, RELAC Board of Directors