Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen Long Island Pension Fund

Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen Long Island Pension Fund

The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen Long Island Pension Fund was established in 1963 to provide retirement benefits exclusively for locomotive engineers employed by the Long Island Rail Road. The fund operates under the umbrella of the BLET, which is itself a Division of the Rail Conference of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Its trustees — Kevin J. Sexton, John A. Kavanaugh Jr., and Karl Bischoff — simultaneously hold the top elected positions within BLET Division 269, fusing fiduciary oversight with active union governance. The fund targets growth investments and secondary opportunities, a dual-track approach suited to a mid-sized pension pool where capital preservation and modest appreciation run in parallel. Asset-class exposure spans public equities, fixed income, and alternative vehicles typical of Taft-Hartley plans, though specific allocations remain undisclosed to the public. Geographic focus centers on the United States, consistent with the domestic employment base of contributing members. Plan Administrator Steven Schlapp oversees day-to-day operations out of the Ronkonkoma, New York office. Total assets sit near $80 million, making this a compact institutional investor relative to the multi-billion-dollar state funds that dominate Northeast pension allocator maps. The fund's professional footprint is lean, anchored by its trustees and administrator without a sprawling internal investment team. It operates without additional offices or affiliated philanthropic foundations, maintaining a tight operational link to the parent BLET and Teamsters infrastructure. The fund's structural differentiator is the direct overlap between its trustee board and the elected leadership of BLET Division 269. The same individuals negotiating labor agreements with the Long Island Rail Road also set investment policy for the pension assets of the workers they represent. That governance model creates an unusually tight feedback loop between labor relations and fiduciary stewardship, a feature rarely observed outside of single-employer Taft-Hartley plans.