tabasco

True, I think I overestimated the number of R's remaining given that this passed and Keating did not get a seat. The opposite of what I predicted.

Do you know for sure the vast majority of voters vote for all 9? Maybe they do. I think a better strategy would have been for the Keating camp to widely advertise that Rs should vote for her and only her. That may have been off putting to some of the electorate but probably would have been worth a shot. I know this went on in the background but I cannot remember it being widely distributed. At the end of the day you are probably right that a lot of voters just take the D sample ballot and go down the line voting for all 9.

I too am surprised. I think it is a good deal. I just really hope the funds don't go poof like they did for the blue ash airport sale, the anthem site, etc. It does appear that there are firm guardrails in place that cannot be changed at the local level. The only way this doesn't work out is if we are a victim of bad timing and get a huge draw down in risk assets right around the time the money is put to work.

Totally agree. I also think it was a big mistake to have Aftab to essentially be the face of sale campaign. Yes the city is predominantly D but there are still many R's out there that vote and they don't like the guy. He is much more partisan than Cranley who was fairly popular with Rs (although less-so with progressives). I am no advertising expert but I think it would have been better if they had made TV commercials with actors pretending to be Rs and Ds and then coming together and agreeing on the issue because the infrastructure benefits everyone. By having a D mayor involved in a lot of the advertising it made it into a more partisan issue in my view when it should not have been. Personally, I really wanted to repudiate the powers that be for their sloppy campaign and I was firmly in the "No" camp for this reason up until I went to vote today and decided to go to "Yes" at the last minute. It is a good deal at the end of the day that makes too much sense and I worry that it won't come back to ballot again if it doesn't pass this time so I had to vote Yes for that reason. We will see if it gets enough votes but I still think it comes up just short and they have no one to blame but themselves for a dreadfully run campaign.

This thing is DOA. The internal polling is bad per insiders. Thing is, it really should have been easy to pass but the messaging and way that they went about it was comically bad. I can't think of one thing that proponents did well until it was already too late. The entire thing was a comedy of errors and a case study in what not to do. It will be interesting to see if they give it another go. I will come back here and eat crow if it actually passes.

It isn't that simple and any experts in academia likely do not have the time or even the expertise or list of contacts to properly do it. Not to mention there are other things that we need like custody of the funds, cost of trading, reporting, due diligence, etc. We can't just open an account at Schwab and have some profs from UC and XU start trading stocks on our behalf. We will be much better served to compensate a team of investment professionals that does this every day as a full time profession and that can provide a complete suite of services. There is a lot of work and service that goes into this. This will likely be set up in a manner where we engage a firm to consult with our board wrt our overall asset allocation and then that firm goes out and selects individual managers for each asset class: stocks, bonds, private equity, real estate, etc. We could end up using someone local like Fund Evaluation Group to do this or we could use one of the global behemoths like BLK.

I hear you and I am very familiar with the construction of an IPS and how endowments and pensions manage their portfolios. Endowments typically look to spend 3-5% of their portfolio each year so our requirements are a bit less than that and thus we don't need to be as aggressive with equity allocation. In a situation where there is a $1.6bln portfolio, if properly constructed, we would have a highly sophisticated board of people who then interact with a variety of 3rd party managers (it may be tempting just to give the whole portfolio to BLK or whoever because they wow us with really low fees but that is probably not the best route and instead we would have multiple managers and make them compete with each other with RFPs). I believe your equity allocation is quite a bit too high at 85%. We will want some equities of course but we will also want a lot of high quality bonds (both IG corps and TSY's). I would favor the ability of the board to have a small allocation to HY and EM due to the long time horizon but would not be surprised if the IPS eschews these lower rated investments and I am ok with that. I would hope that we also have some PE, Private Credit, Mezzanine and other alternative assets as well. My concern stems from the fact that we will likely have clowns on the board interfacing with the 3rd party managers and the clowns will be ill equipped at manager selection, etc. This can cost a fund dearly in returns over time as the vast majority of returns over time are explained by asset allocation. I just have very little faith that the board will be properly constructed and can easily envision a bunch of cronies. Can the mayor just pick whoever he wants? DEI at all costs like all of his other selections? That spells trouble and fund under-performance. Being on this board is not a cushy assignment and requires real work and expertise.

This is a fair point and one that is lost on many that have been conditioned to think that the stock market only goes up, however, a portfolio like this is meant to behave like an endowment (or a pension as you point out), and to exist in perpetuity. As a result, it would be extremely well diversified and not overly reliant on equities. I would think that the portfolio construction would be 40-60% equities tops, a lot of fixed income and some alternatives. It would be nice if there was some discussion of what the investment portfolio would look like instead of incessant sell-the-railroad-figure-the-rest-out-later cheer leading. One of the reasons I am voting no is lack of this disclosure. The board that oversees the selection of third party managers to invest this windfall would likely not have sufficient expertise and would instead be political hacks and random local business leaders that are not sufficiently equipped to oversee an endeavor of this magnitude.