Don’t say the words “socially responsible investing” to Christopher Burnham. He’s a man on a mission — to take politics out of public pension fund investing.
Anything that smacks of a city or state directing its pension money for the purpose of advancing an agenda — like, say, Connecticut divesting from gun companies — is toxic to Burnham, a name many people in Connecticut, especially Fairfield county, should remember from the ’80s and ’90s.
“I am evangelizing this position to keep a personal political agenda out of the management of other people’s money,” Burnham said Wednesday, after a breakfast meeting in midtown Manhattan that he organized to push the cause, a new nonprofit organization and website that will name names.
Sounds OK on the surface: At a time when pension funds are far behind where they need to be — nowhere more than in Connecticut, which is at least $20 billion in the hole and probably much more than that — it makes no sense to sacrifice annual returns to make the world cleaner, nicer, safer, more inclusive. Those are all political agendas in the end, right?
Not so fast. Burnham — a prominent national figure in public finance who was Connecticut state treasurer from 1995 to 1997, and before that, a state representative from Stamford — has waded into waters both murky and stormy. Many pension funds, including Connecticut’s, routinely consider environmental, social and corporate governance issues when it invests in companies.