Sterling Heights General Employees' Retirement System

Sterling Heights General Employees' Retirement System

The Sterling Heights General Employees' Retirement System is a single-employer public pension plan established to provide disability, retirement, and death benefits to the city's general workforce. The system is closed to new entrants, meaning its long-term trajectory is shaped by a shrinking active member base and a growing pool of beneficiaries. John Lamerato leads the Board of Trustees as Chairperson, supported by Secretary Jennifer Varney, Treasurer Jia Hang, and Trustees Brian Geldhof and Michael Moore. The fund's investment posture relies on standard institutional building blocks — an international equities portfolio, a fixed-income portfolio, and a dedicated allocation to real assets and alternatives. Directly owned commercial and mixed-use real estate sits alongside commitments to external real estate funds managed by Principal Real Estate Investors, Intercontinental Real Estate, and American Core Realty Advisors. The remaining alternatives sleeve covers real estate investment funds and other uncorrelated assets. All core public-markets execution is outsourced to external managers; the board oversees asset allocation and manager selection. AUM sits near $107.6 million (Altss estimate), a size that places the system in the lower tier of Michigan's municipal pension plans. The board maintains ties to two major industry associations — MAPERS, where legal counsel serves as general counsel, and NCPERS — signaling a peer-engagement posture common among public funds of this scale. Resources are shared with the Sterling Heights Police and Fire Retirement System, which operates under overlapping governance through Lamerato's leadership. Sterling Heights is a mature, closed pension that functions more as a liability-matching liability runoff vehicle than a growth-oriented allocator. Its structural footprint — a frozen plan attached to a single municipality, no in-house investment team, fully delegated manager structure — constrains its capacity to participate in opportunistic co-investments, direct deals, or emerging manager programs. The fund's primary institutional differentiator is its terminal design, which will increasingly tilt every board decision toward capital preservation and liquidity management.