Fund Bonanza

New Mexico Business Journal, Nov, 2000

Phil Archibeck is a contented man these days. The two funds he oversees as the state investment officer (bearing the decidedly unsexy names of the Land Grant Permanent Fund and the Severance Tax Permanent Fund) earned a combined return last fiscal year of 11.4 percent. Which outperformed the market and benchmark returns of about 9 percent.

This made it possible to distribute more than $27 million, mostly to public schools. Archibeck estimates that by 2015 the state's funds' annual distribution will rise to $1.1 billion, or about 18 percent of the operating budget. Put another way, without this money, your taxes would increase by $600 per return. Total corpus of the funds is approaching $10 billion, making it the third-largest endowment in the country (right after Harvard University and the University of Texas).