Firelands Regional Medical Center Retirement Plan

Firelands Regional Medical Center Retirement Plan

The plan was established in 1967 alongside Firelands Health, the nonprofit medical center that sponsors it. Founding oversight fell to Daniel J. Moncher, the system's retired chief financial officer, who managed both the hospital's investment portfolio and the attendant retirement structures. The plan today covers employees of a regional health network anchored by Firelands Regional Medical Center's main campus on Hayes Avenue. The legal domicile and all plan assets sit in Sandusky, Ohio. The plan allocates capital through a fund-of-funds structure, blending commitments to primary funds with secondary-market purchases. Asset classes historically targeted include private equity, private credit, and real assets, reflecting a standard corporate pension posture toward diversified alternatives. The portfolio is wholly managed by an internal investment committee chaired by Thomas Wolf, with direct links to the CFO, Kevin Riley, and the CEO, Jeremy Normington-Slay. All investment decisions roll up to the system's board of directors, chaired by Roger Gundlach. The plan operates without an external investment consultant, relying instead on direct manager relationships built by the committee over multiple mandate cycles. Firelands Health itself is the primary source of operating context for the plan. The system has grown through a network of commercial clinical properties across Erie County — the South Campus on Hayes Avenue, Sandusky Healthcare Center on Columbus Avenue, the Corporate Health Center on Milan Road, and The Commons of Providence senior living facility. In 2019, the most recent year for which figures are publicly identifiable, the 401k component alone was sized at roughly $127 million (Altss estimate). Firelands Health maintains association memberships with the Ohio Hospital Association and the American Hospital Association. The system is also a major strategic partner of the Greater Sandusky Partnership, though those affiliations do not appear to directly influence plan-level investment activity. The structure that sets this plan apart from single-employer pension pools of similar scale is its bifurcated design: a legacy defined-benefit obligation runs alongside an active 401k, each governed by the same in-house fiduciary group. There is no external investment office, no outsourced CIO, and no third-party administrator with discretionary authority — a governance concentration that puts the entire investment posture in the hands of a single board-level committee. Philanthropic assets, separately housed under The Foundation for Firelands, sit outside the plan's perimeter.