The 2015 Pension 40: Alejandro García Padilla

No. 7 Alejandro García Padilla, Governor / Commonwealth of Puerto Rico

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< The 2015 Pension 40: The Long Climb

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7
Alejandro García Padilla
Governor / Commonwealth of Puerto Rico
Last year: 22

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.


The 2015 Pension 40

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1. Bruce Rauner
Illinois

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2. John & Laura Arnold
Laura and John Arnold Foundation

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3. Chris Christie
New Jersey

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4. Randi Weingarten
AmericanFederation of Teachers

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5. Phyllis Borzi
U.S. Department
of Labor

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6. Kevin de León
California

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7. Alejandro García Padilla
Commonwealth ofPuerto Rico

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8. Laurence Fink
BlackRock

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9. Rahm Emanuel
Chicago

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10. Sean McGarvey
North AmericanBuilding Trades Unions

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11. John Kline
Minnesota

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12. J. Mark Iwry
U.S. Treasury
Department

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13. Damon Silvers
AFL-CIO

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14. Jeffrey Immelt
General
Electric Co.

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15. Joshua Gotbaum
Brookings Institution

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16. Robin Diamonte
United Technologies Corp.

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17. Mark Mullet
Washington

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18. Terry O’Sullivan
Laborers’ International Union of North America

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19. Raymond Dalio
Bridgewater Associates

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20. Ted Wheeler
Oregon

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21. Thomas Nyhan
Central States Southeast and Southwest Areas Pension Fund

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22. Karen Ferguson & Karen Friedman
Pensions Rights Center

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23. Randy DeFrehn
National Coordinating Committee forMultiemployer Plans

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24. Robert O’Keef
Motorola Solutions

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25. Caitlin Long
Morgan Stanley

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26. Kenneth Feinberg
The Law Offices
of Kenneth R. Feinberg

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27. Orrin Hatch
Utah

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28. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend
Center for Retirement Initiatives, Georgetown University

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29. Ian Lanoff
Groom Law Group

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30. Joshua Rauh
Stanford Graduate School of Business

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31. Ted Eliopoulos
California Public Employees’ Retirement System

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32. Edward (Ted) Siedle
Benchmark Financial Services

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33. Teresa Ghilarducci
New School for Social Research

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34. Denise Nappier
Connecticut

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35. W. Thomas Reeder Jr.
Pension BenefitGuaranty Corp.

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36. Hank Kim
National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems

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37. Paul Singer
Elliott Management Corp.

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38. Bailey Childers
National PublicPension Coalition

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39. Amy Kessler
Prudential Financial

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40. Judy Mares
U.S. Labor Department


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