San Diego County Regional Airport Authority Retirement Plan

San Diego County Regional Airport Authority Retirement Plan

The San Diego County Regional Airport Authority Retirement Plan is a defined benefit public pension plan covering employees of the airport authority that operates San Diego International Airport. It does not independently invest its assets. Instead, the plan pools its capital within a larger group trust managed by the San Diego City Employees' Retirement System, which also serves the City of San Diego and the San Diego Unified Port District as co-participants. Kimberly Becker served as the airport authority's President and CEO through a planned 2025 retirement. Because the plan invests solely through the SDCERS group trust, its asset allocation mirrors the broader system's targets across public equities, fixed income, private equity, real estate, and private credit. The trust's real estate portfolio includes direct property holdings in Phoenix and Chelmsford, Massachusetts — positions that benefit all three participating entities. The plan does not run separate manager searches, negotiate side letters, or make direct co-investments; its investment posture is entirely defined by SDCERS board and staff decisions led by CEO Gregg Rademacher and Board President Lisa Marie Harris. The SDCRAA plan's governance relationship with SDCERS is not an outsourced-CIO arrangement in the commercial sense but a statutory assignment under California public pension law. The plan participates in SDCERS board deliberations through an airport authority representative but holds no independent investment committee. SDCERS reports its consolidated performance publicly, and the airport authority plan relies on those consolidated disclosures rather than publishing a stand-alone annual investment report. The plan's structural differentiator is its deliberate absence of any separate investment apparatus. Unlike most local government pension plans in California that operate their own boards, staff, and consultant relationships, the airport authority plan exists solely as a legal entity attaching benefits to a workforce — all asset management, actuarial, and compliance functions flow through the SDCERS group trust infrastructure.