City of Los Angeles Deferred Compensation Plan

City of Los Angeles Deferred Compensation Plan

The City of Los Angeles Deferred Compensation Plan launched as the voluntary, tax-advantaged supplemental retirement vehicle for the city's workforce, operating under Internal Revenue Code Section 457(b). The plan's board includes senior leadership from the city's three major personnel and pension bodies: LACERS (Neil Guglielmo), LAFPP (Joseph Salazar), and the Personnel Department (Dana H. Brown). Organized labor, represented on the board by Bob Schoonover, ensures the plan's design reflects collective bargaining priorities. The board sets investment policy, selects the fund lineup, and monitors recordkeeping and administrative vendors. The investment architecture is deliberately conservative. The plan offers a DCP Stable Value Fund — a capital-preservation vehicle backed by insurance-company wrap contracts — and an FDIC-insured savings account option for participants with near-zero risk tolerance. Beyond these defensive sleeves, the plan provides a diversified menu of mutual funds spanning domestic and international equity, fixed income, and target-date series, though the specific fund managers are not publicly itemized on the plan's primary site. The emphasis stays on low-fee, institutionally priced share classes, consistent with fiduciary standards under the plan's governmental plan sponsor status exempt from ERISA but bound by parallel state-level fiduciary obligations. With an Altss-estimated $4.0B in participant assets, the plan ranks among the larger municipal 457(b) pools nationally. The board's governance structure places operational oversight with city department heads rather than a standalone investment staff, differentiating it from the in-house investment offices maintained by LACERS and LAFPP. The plan participates in NAGDCA, the industry association for governmental defined contribution administrators, and has received multiple NAGDCA Leadership Recognition Awards for participant education and plan design initiatives (per public record). Board members and staff also participate in IFEBP training programs. The structural differentiator is the plan's role as an aggregator rather than an asset manager. Unlike the city's defined-benefit plans — which employ internal investment professionals and external consultant relationships to actively manage multi-billion-dollar portfolios across private equity, real assets, and credit — the DCP operates a participant-directed architecture. The board selects and monitors a curated fund menu but never allocates directly to alternatives or negotiates co-investments. Its influence on Los Angeles's retirement ecosystem comes from its scale as a distribution channel for institutional fund managers and its position as the only voluntary, portable savings plan for city employees outside their mandatory pension contributions.