Forest Preserve District Employees' Annuity and Benefit Fund of Cook County

Forest Preserve District Employees' Annuity and Benefit Fund of Cook County

The Illinois General Assembly created the Forest Preserve District Employees' Annuity and Benefit Fund in 1931, three years before the passage of the state's first comprehensive pension code. The fund serves current and former employees of the Forest Preserve District of Cook County — the government body that since 1914 has acquired, restored, and maintained the Chicagoland region's open-space system. It operates as a defined-benefit plan, meaning participating employees accrue a guaranteed retirement income based on years of service and final average salary, with the sponsoring employer — the District itself — bearing the actuarial risk of investment shortfalls. The fund deploys capital across a broad asset-class spectrum spanning real estate, private equity, venture capital, and hedge-fund strategies. Its real-estate book includes stakes in the Heitman America Real Estate Trust, the Principal US Property Account, Artemis Real Estate Partners Fund, and Clarion Partners Real Estate — a national footprint concentrated in core and value-add office, industrial, and mixed-use properties. On the alternatives side, the fund gains venture and buyout exposure through fund-of-funds commitments and acknowledges early-stage, growth, mezzanine, distressed debt, and special-situations allocations. A Blackstone Alternative Asset Management (BAAM) position provides multi-manager hedge-fund access. The fund has explicitly tagged seed-stage and start-up venture as part of its mandate, suggesting an appetite for emerging-manager exposure alongside larger institutional relationships. The pension fund does not operate as a standalone investment office. It is administered jointly with the County Employees' and Officers' Annuity and Benefit Fund of Cook County — a pairing that consolidates governance, staff, and board oversight across two distinct but related municipal employee populations. This shared-services arrangement is uncommon among county-level pension systems and concentrates a significant portion of Cook County's retirement assets under one operational roof. The fund holds memberships in the National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems (NCPERS), the Council of Institutional Investors (CII), and the National Association of Securities Professionals (NASP). No recent mandated searches, manager hires, or allocation shifts within the last 24 months are verifiable through public record. The fund's structural identity is shaped less by asset-allocation novelty than by governance architecture. By administering two pension plans with distinct employer sponsors and beneficiary pools through a single board and staff, the Forest Preserve fund effectively outsources its investment-function independence to a pooled decision-making apparatus. For an institutional allocator, this creates a bundled due-diligence pathway — one relationship team, one investment-policy process — that controls access to both the Forest Preserve and the larger County Employees' pool, a dynamic that concentrates Chicago-area public-pension gatekeeping power.