CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – Two University of Illinois employees have been elected to the new board of the State Universities Retirement System of Illinois, which manages pension funds for about 70 state universities, community colleges and state agencies.
J. Fred Giertz and Dorinda K. Miller were among six trustees elected to the reorganized board in a mail-in vote by the retirement system’s contributors and retirees, SURS said in a statement released Thursday.
Giertz, an economics professor and the interim head of the economics department who served on the SURS board from 1995 to 2005, was elected to a six-year term. Miller, a clerk in the department of natural resources and environmental sciences, was elected to a three-year term. She also is the president of Local 3700 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which represents more than 1,800 employees on the Urbana-Champaign campus.
Gov. Pat Quinn signed legislation in April eliminating the existing governor-appointed board of trustees for SURS, which provides benefit services for more than 180,000 workers and retirees.
The new 11-member board will include a mix of gubernatorial appointees and trustees elected by SURS members. Giertz and Miller are among four trustees still making contributions toward SURS benefits who were elected by other members contributing into the system.
The others are Southern Illinois University agribusiness economics professor Jeffrey R. Beaulieu and Antonio A. Vasquez, an economics instructor for City Colleges of Chicago.
Two trustees now collecting SURS benefits were elected by other SURS retirees. They are John H. Engstrom, a retired Northern Illinois University accountancy professor, and Mitchell Vogel, the president of the current SURS board and a retired professor and chair of the Educational Leadership Department at Northeastern Illinois University.
Under the new law that reorganized the SURS board, no more than two of the contributing member trustees may be from the three U. of I. campuses, and no more than one of the trustees who are collecting SURS benefits may be from the U. of I. campuses.
Quinn has not yet named four governor-appointed trustees. The final member will be the chairperson of the Illinois Board of Higher Education, who will serve as the president of the new SURS board.
