ANew York City worker scanning the Web site of the New York City Employees’ Retirement System, or browsing its annual report, will find a list of 11 trustees who include some well-known names. There is the elected comptroller of the city of New York, William Thompson Jr., and the public advocate, Betsy Gotbaum. There are the presidents of all five boroughs, along with Mayor Bloomberg’s finance commissioner, Martha Stark. And there are the elected heads of the city’s three largest municipal unions — Lillian Roberts of DC 37, Carroll Haynes of the Teamsters, and Roger Toussaint, who was famously ordered jailed by a state judge as punishment for shutting down the city with a transit strike during the holiday shopping season.

These 11 trustees, the NYCERS Web site explains, are “responsible for investing money wisely, to ensure funds are available to members when they retire.” They also are the ones who, one might think, approved the decision by the NYCERS board to go along with a suggestion by a class-action law firm that it file a shareholder lawsuit against Apple. That lawsuit was the topic of editorials in yesterday’s New York Sun (“Thompson’s Trial Lawyers“) and on January 25, 2007 (“New York Versus Apple.”)

Well, one might think. But go get a copy, as we did, of the minutes of the October 24, 2006 “regular meeting,” of the NYCERS “Board of Trustees,” the one where the city Law Department claims a vote to go ahead with the lawsuit against Apple took place, and the list of the actual trustees who attended the so-called meeting of the “board” includes not 11 trustees, not 10 trustees, not nine trustees, not eight trustees but exactly one. That’s right, just one actual trustee.

The three labor leaders weren’t there. The five borough presidents weren’t there. Comptroller Thompson wasn’t there. Commissioner Stark wasn’t there. The only one who bothered to show up in person for a meeting on managing $45 billion in public pension funds was Ms. Gotbaum. The rest of the trustees — 10 out of 11 of them — sent underlings or aides or representatives or staffers or deputies.

Now, there’s no doubt that some, maybe even all, of the underlings are highly capable and experienced and skilled. The New York City Administrative Code, 13-103, allows all of the 11 NYCERS trustees except for the comptroller to designate representatives to attend the meetings. We faxed over a copy of the relevant law to the comptroller’s office on Thursday and asked under what authority he was sending a representative rather than showing up himself. We put the question again yesterday, and still haven’t received an answer.

In the meantime, an absentee trustee trying to follow from a distance, via documents, what was happening with the Apple litigation would have a difficult time. The one page “executive agenda” for the six-and-a-half-hour October 24 meeting made no reference at all to Apple or to the fact that a vote would be held at the meeting on proceeding with litigation. The minutes distributed after the meeting report only, vaguely, that in executive session “the Trustees authorized the Corporation Counsel to pursue certain litigation which will become public at the time the litigation is filed.”

All the more reason that the absentee trustees may want to reconsider their decision to delegate the task of attending these meetings to their underlings. After all, the directors of Apple computer are being sued by NYCERS for allegedly failing to provide proper oversight. But the Apple directors, at least, weren’t in the habit of sending their footmen to board meetings in their own stead. If things take an unfavorable turn for the New York City Employees’ Retirement System, it’s conceivable that some enterprising class-action lawyer might look at them as targets. Apple’s stock appreciated 600%, after all, and it still got sued.