OPERS staff retirements bring leadership changes in Health Care and External Affairs departments

Due to the recent retirements of a few key staff, we thought that we should fill you in on the current OPERS leadership team. Several members of our team have moved on to the next phase in their lives after a number of years providing successful guidance through challenging times of transition for the retirement system, including significant pension legislation in 2013 and implementation of the OPERS Medicare Connector in 2016.

With the recent retirements of OPERS Health Care Director Marianne Steger and Chief Operations Officer Blake Sherry, Tonya Brown has been named Interim Director of Member Operations. In this role, Tonya will be leading the Benefits, Health Care, Enterprise Risk and Governance divisions.

We have realigned our Health Care division and transferred our health care processors to the Benefits division. OPERS believes the change has been positive, as we continue to improve our health care processing, our handling of member and retiree issues and offer a more seamless transition between the Benefits and Health Care areas.

In addition, with the retirement of Chief External Affairs Officer Carol Drake, Government Relations Officer Gordon Gatien has become the Interim Director of Government Relations. The Government Relations team will be its own division, directly reporting to Executive Director Karen Carraher. This new arrangement will allow our Government Relations team to continue to function as effective advocates for the retirement system and provide quality constituent service for legislators and stakeholder organizations.