Carbon County's retirement fund is in "very good" shape, officials report.

Last week, county controller Robert Crampsie, secretary to the retirement board, spoke about the actuarial evaluation of the fund for 2015."The actuarial report is like when we go to the doctor and get an annual checkup and see how our overall health is," he said. "I can tell you in reviewing the report, the overall health of the Carbon County retirement system is very good."That is good news for the 340 retirees collecting retirement benefits through the county system.Crampsie said the county fund ended 2015 pretty "flat" meaning it didn't meet the actuarial assumption of 7.5 percent performancewise, but also didn't lose a lot of funds, remaining at near zero.Its funded ratio as of Dec. 31, 2015, was 102 percent."Again, we are over that 100 percent mark," Crampsie said, noting that the 102 percent funded ratio means that the county's assets exceed its liabilities. "If we were a business and we went out of business today, we would have enough money in our retirement fund to meet all of our future obligations."I can tell you there are not too many retirement systems around that can say that," he added, pointing out that wise decisions in the past led to a healthy retirement fund for the future.Carbon County's funded ratio did drop two percentage points from 2014, and Crampsie explained that is due to two things: the flat performance of the fund overall and the liabilities increasing a bit more than normal as a result of a 46 percent increase in overtime pay to corrections officers at the prison and additional hours needed at the four magistrate offices.Last year, Carbon County paid $346,000 in overtime pay at the prison, up from $237,000 in 2014."We're going to have to continue to try and get that under control," he said, noting that the prison board has taken some steps to try to cut down on overtime hours, but added that sometimes it is hard because of union contract requirements."When you increase the hours, that increases the liabilities," he said.The report also continued with positive points, including a lower annual required contribution than estimated.Carbon County budgeted $451,522 for the annual payment, but must contribute only $328,866 to the retirement fund to meet its obligation.Carbon County paid out $3,936,675 last year in retirement benefits, up from $2,741,000 paid out in 2008.The county retirement fund portfolio value this year, as of March 31, stood at $70,359,782, Crampsie said."March was a fantastic month from a performance standpoint," he said. "We picked up a little over $3.2 million."He added that for the first quarter of 2016, the fund was up 1.8 percent overall, which was very close to the actuarial assumption targets, and was beating the policy index, which is the benchmark that the county uses to show performance, by 0.5 percent.Crampsie said that Michael Shone, president of the Peirce Park Group Investment Management Consultants, said that of all the clients Peirce Park manages, Carbon County was the best performing client for the first quarter of 2016.