Carbon County officials have made a change to the county's retirement portfolio that will hopefully help with its continued positive performance.

Last week, the county retirement board voted on the recommendation of Michael Shone, managing director for Marquette Associates, to terminate Emerald Advisers Inc. as its small cap stocks manager and consolidate the money from Emerald's account into a stock market index and 4 percent in a mid cap index.Shone provided two options based on his company's findings of what Carbon's best choices would be moving forward. He noted that through this, the county should see an annual savings of about $35,000 in fees.Carbon County hired Emerald in June 2013 and its lagging performance over the past few years.Robert Crampsie, county controller and secretary to the retirement board, said that Emerald had ample time to turn it around and said that this move allows the county to stop the bleeding when it comes to that portion of the portfolio.Carbon County currently has $74,559,628 in its retirement portfolio, which is a reserved fund separate from the county's general fund that is used for county retirees.Shone said that Carbon's fund is one of the healthiest in that it has continually outperformed benchmarks."This quarter, you made $2.75 million. For the year, your plan made $7.5 million and over the last three years, your plan made about $12 million," Shone said. "That's very significant."He said in the past five years, Carbon County has situated itself in the top 28 percent compared to other plans out there.The board thanked its consultants like Marquette Associates for keeping on top of the portfolio.The retirement board voted to approve a notice of termination from Cohen, Placitella & Roth P.C., which was hired by the county to monitor security holdings, identify portfolio losses and investigate if there are actionable claims.The firm has not had much activity with the county because Carbon has another firm conducting similar monitoring.