Carbon County's retirement board made a $6 million adjustment to its retirement portfolio on Thursday.

The board, on a recommendation from Michael Shone of the Peirce Park Group Investment Management Consultants of West Chester, voted to move the approximately $6.6 million in assets in the county's equity portfolio presently with C.S. McKee Core Equity, one of the county's global equity managers, to a Vanguard S&P 500 index."Right now we have to stop the bleeding and put it into the index," Robert Crampsie, county controller and secretary to the retirement board, said.C.S. McKee has been continually underperforming for over a year now, Shone told the board before the vote."C.S. McKee continues to struggle," Shone said.For C.S. McKee's year-to-date return, the company's performance was down 0.5 percent versus its benchmark of 3.8 percent, and for the last year, the performance was negative 4.2 percent against their benchmark of 4 percent."They are actually under their benchmark by 8 percentage points," Shone said. "No asset manager will outperform every single time if they are an active manager, but on the equity side, it is a concern because not only has it been underperforming for a long time, the magnitude of underperformance for the past year becomes a real issue.""We have got to do something about the equity part that we do have with C.S. McKee," Crampsie said. "We have been hanging in there hoping that C.S. McKee would turn it around. You have a quarter, maybe two quarters, but when this starts accumulating, we start leaving quite a bit of money on the table."Last year, the county retirement board took half of the money C.S. McKee managed away and invested in a new company. At that time, officials said they would revisit the matter halfway through 2016.C.S. McKee also holds just under $18 million of Carbon County's money on the fixed-income side, and officials said that will remain with them at this time.Shone said that based on the fees Carbon was paying for the equity portfolio, as well as if they are able to renegotiate a lower fee schedule for the fixed income side, the county stands to save approximately $50,000 a year through the change.In other retirement matters, Shone reported that of all the clients his company manages, Carbon County's retirement portfolio, which as of June 30 stands at $70,741,466, "has had the best returns for the first quarter and the best year-to-date."A lot of this was caused by the decisions you made last year," he said. "For the first quarter, the changes you made were absolutely fabulous."But even with the good news, Shone cautioned the board that there are still two quarters to go before the end of the year and anything can still happen.