SW OH Regional Council of Carpenters Pension Plan

SW OH Regional Council of Carpenters Pension Plan

The Southwest Ohio Regional Council of Carpenters Pension Plan covers construction-industry participants in the Cincinnati-Dayton corridor, sponsored by the Southwest Ohio Regional Council of Carpenters labor organization. Like many multiemployer plans in the building trades, it faced severe funding shortfalls that triggered benefit cuts under the Multiemployer Pension Reform Act of 2014 (MPRA). Those cuts were reversed when the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation approved $182.7 million in Special Financial Assistance in 2023 — a one-time infusion designed under the American Rescue Plan Act to restore full benefits through at least 2051 (per PBGC, 2023). The plan's investment posture is a classic fund-of-funds stack common to smaller union pension plans: a heavy overweight to core real estate alongside a thin layer of liquid alternatives and money-market ballast. Known real estate commitments include the AFL-CIO Building Investment Trust, American Core Realty Fund, Principal Enhanced Property Fund, and a local direct holding in a mixed-use asset in Greater Cincinnati. The fund also holds the Pimco Commodity Return Fund for inflation-aware exposure and the American Stable Value Fund for principal protection. No venture, no direct private equity — this is a preservation-plus-yield construction. The board operates with the lean governance typical of regional multiemployer plans: a secretary of trustees and a plan administrator as the named fiduciaries, with no disclosed internal investment staff. Asset management is entirely delegated to external fund managers. The plan's geographic focus is implicitly regional, but the underlying fund commitments give it national real estate exposure through pooled institutional vehicles. The distinguishing structural feature of this plan is its ongoing status as a PBGC-assisted entity. Most pension profiles treat federal backstops as an edge case; here, the SFA grant is the defining operational fact. Every investment decision now sits inside a regulatory framework where the PBGC monitors the plan's path to projected solvency, and any deviation in funding ratio or benefit disbursement draws federal scrutiny. That makes this plan more constrained — and more predictable — than a typical multiemployer fund of comparable size.