Mo-Kan Iron Workers Trust Funds

Mo-Kan Iron Workers Trust Funds

The Mo-Kan Iron Workers Trust Funds were established in 1970 to provide retirement, disability, and death benefits to members of Iron Workers Local Union No. 10 in the Kansas City region. The plan operates as a defined-benefit Taft-Hartley fund, jointly governed by union trustees and contributing employers under collective bargaining agreements. Plan Administrator Don E. Greenwell III and Plan Sponsor Representative David Coleman oversee day-to-day operations from the fund's single office in Kansas City, Missouri. The fund's investment strategy reflects a streamlined approach common among smaller multiemployer plans: concentrated allocations to tangible assets with long-duration cash flows that match pension liabilities. Public records indicate the trust maintains a direct U.S. real estate investment fund with mixed-use exposure across North America and a separate commitment to natural resources strategies. Unlike larger public pension systems that spread mandates across dozens of external managers, Mo-Kan appears to operate with a deliberately narrow roster of investment relationships — consistent with administrative capacity constraints typical of plans below $300 million in assets. Alongside the pension fund, the trust operates a separate Mo-Kan Iron Workers Welfare Fund providing health and welfare benefits to participants. The dual-fund structure is standard for Taft-Hartley plans, where ERISA requires strict segregation of pension and welfare assets. As of 2026, the combined entity operates from a single Kansas City location. The fund's most recent Form 5500 filings — the primary public disclosure mechanism for Taft-Hartley plans — detail the trustee governance structure but do not publicly list individual positions or external manager relationships. The plan's structural differentiator is its exclusivity clause: it serves only Iron Workers Local No. 10 members, creating a unusually tight feedback loop between beneficiaries, contributing employers, and investment strategy. This single-union, single-city architecture means the plan's liability stream is intensely correlated with regional construction cycles, which likely drives the heavy real-asset tilt — the trustees and employers intuitively understand the physical assets they hold, reducing governance complexity at a scale where every basis point of administrative cost matters.