Missouri Department of Transportation & Patrol Employees' Retirement System

Missouri Department of Transportation & Patrol Employees' Retirement System

The Missouri Department of Transportation & Patrol Employees' Retirement System (MPERS) was established in 1955 to serve the career employees of MoDOT and the Missouri State Highway Patrol. Executive Director Scott Simon oversees the day-to-day administration from Jefferson City, while CIO Larry Krummen is the named fiduciary guiding the investment program. The system is governed by a board that includes active MoDOT employee representatives like Chair Todd Tyler, alongside state senators and the patrol's colonel. The investment program blends traditional public-market exposures with an unusually concrete private-markets allocation. The fund commits across the full capital structure — buyout, growth, venture (from seed to late-stage), mezzanine, and distressed debt — using a mix of fund-of-funds relationships, co-investments, and direct secondaries. MPERS directly owns a globally diversified timberland portfolio, a United States farmland portfolio, and a global infrastructure allocation alongside commercial real estate vehicles managed by Heitman. The fund participates in industry peer-ranking universes including the InvestorForce Public Fund Universe. While the system does not publish its exact headcount, the team is anchored by longtime CIO Larry Krummen and Executive Director Scott Simon. MPERS is an active participant in state and national retirement-system bodies: Simon serves as a voting board member of the Missouri Association of Public Employee Retirement Systems (MAPERS), and the fund holds memberships in the Council of Institutional Investors (CII), the National Association of State Retirement Administrators (NASRA), and the Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA), where it has been recognized for excellence in financial reporting. No major dated operational events have been publicly disclosed in the last 24 months. Structurally, MPERS differentiates itself from many state-level peers by maintaining direct ownership of hard assets — notably farmland and timberland — as a deliberate inflation hedge and uncorrelated return stream within a defined-benefit pension wrapper. Rather than outsourcing all private-market exposure through broad commingled funds, the system holds pieces of global land and operating infrastructure directly on its books, making the portfolio physically legible beyond its actuarial assumptions.