John R. Mumma

September, 2010

Downtown Court Parking

At the end of July it was brought to my attention that an anonymous notice was posted in many stations around the City declaring that effective August 2, officers would no longer be allowed to park at “Auto Park 10” on Broadway for court appearances at 210 Temple Street. The notices said the new location was “Auto Park 15” on Spring Street, and it would cost $5 per entry. I immediately brought this to the Department’s attention and was told that the notice was not official and not accurate. While it is true that Auto Park 10 is no longer available to LAPD personnel for court, the new official location is the “Erector Set” parking structure immediately behind the old PAB. Your 999 key opens the gate. The following day I learned that the LAPD stopped issuing 999 keys to new officers quite some time ago and therefore this fix was problematic. I again contacted the Department and within a few hours I was told they would be putting an ID card scanner on the gate ASAP. There is a formal notice out regarding this, available on the LAN, and it was included in the August e-newsletter. My thanks to Commander Weinstein for her prompt resolution to this situation.

LAPPL Benefits Trust

For many decades the League has offered you an ever-increasing array of insurance plans. We now offer several life insurance plans for you and your family members; Delta Dental insurance; long-term disability insurance; and the LAPPL Legal Plan, which is probably the best career insurance available anywhere.

In 1976, the League Board wrote a formal trust document declaring the intent to treat all insurance monies as a legal trust and defining how the plan must be administered. Somewhere along the line (no records exist, but a long time ago) the Board designated various League members as trustees to assist the Board in overseeing the assets and administration of the various insurance plans. Since that time every Board has treated it like a trust. Two years ago, at a conference on such matters, I figured out that the trust agreement, which had been restated several times over the years, had become outdated and needed to be restated once more. The very purpose of putting assets in a trust is to ensure they are legally protected from any creditors the League itself may incur (we are a large business after all) and to ensure the monies are used exclusively for the benefit of the insurance plans.

Therefore, the Board of Directors and the trustee members embarked on a nearly year-long effort to completely address all of the issues. We hired a nationally known trust lawyer out of Philadelphia, James Beall, to assist with this. I’m very pleased to let you know that not only have we finalized the trust agreement (and fully executed it with the IRS) but we have, for the first time, adopted written policies for the trust on “Travel Expenses,” “Conflict of Interest” and “Record Retention.”

I also led a lengthy process to revamp our investment portfolio for insurance monies. Checchi Capital Advisors was ultimately selected by the Board to handle the investment side of things. We are remaining very conservative and following an indexing method of investing. This keeps the fees much lower than any actively managed investments. In addition, one of the really great aspects of this approach — in light of the recent failure of so many big investment houses — is that we actually maintain “custody” of all of our investments directly. Normally money invested is technically in the control of either a brokerage firm or a third-party custodian bank. That’s normally not a problem unless that bank/brokerage happens to fail. By maintaining custody we further save on fees and don’t have to worry about what happens to our investments if anything happens to the companies we employ. We would still have full control of our assets as they would not be tied up in bankruptcy litigation.

There are seven trustees who now have full legal responsibility for the “Los Angeles Police Protective League Benefits Trust.” They are the four Board members of the League’s Insurance Committee (at this time consisting of Corina Lee, Tyler Izen, Brian Johnson and myself); League members Julian Melendez, Silva Atwater and Kent Oderinlo round out the bunch. James McSorley is an official alternate for the three member positions. If any of them cannot attend a meeting he replaces them with full voting authority. This gives us the ability to always have a replacement trustee who is immediately fully versed in the plans, their administration and investments. As trustees do retire or resign from time to time, we will always have someone we have been training ready to replace them. This year I was elected the chairman and Melendez the secretary.

This may not be the most glamorous part of what the League does but it is enormously important to you and your families. I’m honored to have led this project on your behalf.

Please contact me with any questions or comments at johnmumma@lappl.org.