Michigan Municipal Employees' Retirement System (MERS)

Michigan Municipal Employees' Retirement System (MERS)

Michigan Municipal Employees' Retirement System was created by the state legislature in 1945 to provide retirement security for non-teaching municipal employees across Michigan. Today it covers roughly 60,000 active and retired members from more than 800 participating municipalities. Jeb Burns has led the investment office since 2002, building an internal team that executes directly rather than delegating all discretion to external consultants. The system operates from a low-rise office building on Municipal Way in Lansing, deliberately outside the financial-center gravity of Chicago or New York. MERS allocates across public equities, fixed income, real estate, private markets, and real assets. The private-markets program, led by Managing Director Edward J. Mikolay, targets venture capital, private credit, real estate equity, and natural-resource investments. The fund holds direct stakes in operational assets that few other US public pensions touch — a coffee farm in Hawaii, an alternative-energy venture spanning Arizona and Germany, and a dedicated natural-capital allocation that includes agriculture and farmland. The real-estate portfolio extends beyond core US office and multifamily to include a real-estate stock index portfolio and direct commercial properties. Burns has described the approach as backing tangible, cash-flowing assets that offer inflation protection independent of public-market beta. The internal investment staff is small by pension standards, built around a flat senior team. Burns serves as Vice Chair of the National Association of State Investment Officers, extending MERS's peer network beyond its Midwestern base. He is also a past chair of the Pacific Pension & Investment Institute, a cross-Pacific network of institutional asset owners. These affiliations give a Lansing-based pension line-of-sight into deal flow more commonly associated with coastal endowments. In September 2024, MERS committed $50 million to a middle-market private-credit fund managed by Monroe Capital, continuing a multi-year buildout of the private-credit sleeve. MERS differs from most state-level US pensions in the directness of its real-asset program. Where peer systems typically access agriculture, timber, and renewables through commingled funds managed by third-party GPs, MERS holds at least two assets — a Hawaiian coffee operation and a transatlantic energy investment — with the direct-operating character of a family office's natural-resource book. Combined with Burns's sustained tenure and the institution's willingness to run a concentrated internal team, the architecture looks less like the peer-group median and more like a permanent-capital vehicle attached to a municipal benefits obligation.