This content is from: Corner Office
The 2015 Pension 40: Alejandro García Padilla
No. 7 Alejandro García Padilla, Governor / Commonwealth of Puerto Rico


When a public employee pension plan with a funding ratio under 1 percent isn’t the biggest fiscal problem your administration faces, you know you’re in trouble. That’s exactly the situation faced by Puerto Rico’s governor, Alejandro García Padilla, 44. The commonwealth’s two major pension plans, the Employees Retirement System and the Teachers Retirement System, have staggering unfunded liabilities: As much as 99.3 percent, or $30 billion, for the employees’ system; 88.5 percent, or $13.1 billion, for the teachers’. The most optimistic recent data suggests the employees’ assets will be fully depleted by 2021, when the commonwealth will have to find more than $1 billion a year to pay retirees. Yet the estimated $45 billion pension shortfall isn’t the really bad news. In 2013, before its credit rating was slashed to junk, Puerto Rico, with a population of 3.5 million, was the third-largest issuer of U.S. muni debt, behind only New York and California. In June, when Padilla announced that Puerto Rico owed more than $72 billion to creditors and couldn’t pay, the muni market sold off. With more than $1 billion in bond payments coming due between December 1 and January 1, the commonwealth and its representatives have been in intense negotiations with creditors. Meanwhile, Congress, the White House and the U.S. Treasury Department are exploring options that include letting Puerto Rico file for bankruptcy, which it’s now banned from doing. Padilla is up for reelection in 2016 and expected to face a tough fight to stay in office. If he survives the election and debt negotiations, he will still confront the enormous pension shortfall.
![]() 2. John & Laura Arnold Laura and John Arnold Foundation ![]() 3. Chris Christie New Jersey ![]() 4. Randi Weingarten AmericanFederation of Teachers ![]() 5. Phyllis Borzi U.S. Department of Labor |
![]() 6. Kevin de León California ![]() 7. Alejandro García Padilla Commonwealth ofPuerto Rico ![]() 8. Laurence Fink BlackRock ![]() 9. Rahm Emanuel Chicago ![]() 10. Sean McGarvey North AmericanBuilding Trades Unions |
![]() 11. John Kline Minnesota ![]() 12. J. Mark Iwry U.S. Treasury Department ![]() 13. Damon Silvers AFL-CIO ![]() 14. Jeffrey Immelt General Electric Co. ![]() 15. Joshua Gotbaum Brookings Institution |
![]() 16. Robin Diamonte United Technologies Corp. ![]() 17. Mark Mullet Washington ![]() 18. Terry O'Sullivan Laborers' International Union of North America ![]() 19. Raymond Dalio Bridgewater Associates ![]() 20. Ted Wheeler Oregon |
![]() 21. Thomas Nyhan Central States Southeast and Southwest Areas Pension Fund ![]() 22. Karen Ferguson & Karen Friedman Pensions Rights Center ![]() 23. Randy DeFrehn National Coordinating Committee forMultiemployer Plans ![]() 24. Robert O'Keef Motorola Solutions ![]() 25. Caitlin Long Morgan Stanley |
![]() 26. Kenneth Feinberg The Law Offices of Kenneth R. Feinberg ![]() 27. Orrin Hatch Utah ![]() 28. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend Center for Retirement Initiatives, Georgetown University ![]() 29. Ian Lanoff Groom Law Group ![]() 30. Joshua Rauh Stanford Graduate School of Business |
![]() 31. Ted Eliopoulos California Public Employees' Retirement System ![]() 32. Edward (Ted) Siedle Benchmark Financial Services ![]() 33. Teresa Ghilarducci New School for Social Research ![]() 34. Denise Nappier Connecticut ![]() 35. W. Thomas Reeder Jr. Pension BenefitGuaranty Corp. |
![]() 36. Hank Kim National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems ![]() 37. Paul Singer Elliott Management Corp. ![]() 38. Bailey Childers National PublicPension Coalition ![]() 39. Amy Kessler Prudential Financial ![]() 40. Judy Mares U.S. Labor Department |