The 2015 Pension 40: Ted Wheeler

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Ted Wheeler
Treasurer / Oregon
Last year: 18

Nearly five years of work paid off in June for Ted Wheeler, 53, when Oregon Governor Kate Brown signed a bill allowing for the creation of a private sector retirement savings plan for workers who can’t get one through their employers. Wheeler, Oregon’s state treasurer since 2010, was named chairman of the Oregon Retirement Savings Task Force in 2011, whose goal was to recommend a plan to the legislature for private sector workers. “There were people who thought it was the greatest thing ever and people who thought it was the beginning of the end for civilization,” says Wheeler, who has an undergraduate degree in economics from Stanford University, an MBA from Columbia University and a master’s in public policy from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Many questioned whether the initiative was necessary considering the private retirement products available, but Wheeler contends that if employees don’t have access to auto-enrollment at work, all those options don’t help. “If we simply continue with the status quo, with about half of Americans not saving adequately for retirement, the cost to taxpayers will be staggering as more and more people rely upon costly government safety-net programs,” he says. Oregon’s $87.9 billion state retirement system was recently listed in a Wall Street Journal analysis as the fifth healthiest in the country, with 95.9 percent of future obligations funded. Wheeler, who is running for mayor of his hometown of Portland, attributes the system’s health to strong earnings, which he hopes will continue to improve with the impending adoption of BlackRock’s Aladdin portfolio management system.

The 2015 Pension 40