Phil Angelides

Phil Angelides has earned national recognition as an effective leader with a strong record of accomplishment in both the public and private sectors. He has successfully led large organizations and spearheaded complex projects in a variety of fields. He has won praise for his trailblazing work in sustainable development, investment in urban and underserved communities, clean energy, environmentally responsible investment, and financial market reform.

Mr. Angelides is currently President and owner of Riverview Capital Investments, which focuses on developing sustainable urban communities and clean energy projects. He is also a principal in EVC Partners LLC, a venture which is acquiring sites on major transportation corridors on the west coast to be developed as electric vehicle charging stations for light duty/passenger vehicles and medium and heavy-duty trucks.

From 2009 to 2011, Mr. Angelides served as Chairman of the U.S. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which was charged with conducting the nation’s official inquiry into the causes of the 2008 financial crisis. The Commission presented its report to the President and Congress in January 2011, concluding that the crisis was avoidable and was caused by widespread failures of regulation, reckless risk taking by Wall Street, government leaders ill-prepared for crisis, and a systemic breakdown in accountability and ethics. The report made the New York Times and Washington Post best sellers lists and The New York Review of Books hailed it as “the most comprehensive indictment of the American financial failure that has yet been made” and “the definitive history of this period.” In 2010, Mr. Angelides was named by Worth magazine as 7th among the 100 most powerful people in global finance.

From 1999 to 2007, Mr. Angelides served as California’s elected State Treasurer. The Associated Press reported that he made “the sleepy treasurer’s office a policy powerhouse,” and The Sacramento Bee praised him as “the most effective and dynamic state treasurer in a generation.”

During his tenure, Mr. Angelides launched investment initiatives that directed more than $26 billion to support sustainable development and to create housing, jobs, and economic opportunities in urban and underserved communities. He put the weight of the state’s pension funds behind investments in clean energy and energy efficiency and the fight against global warming – seeding the “green tech” investment movement at a critical early moment and mobilizing institutional investors to address the threat of climate change. As early as 2002, he warned of excesses in the nation’s financial markets, organizing pension funds across the country to push for market reforms. And, long before the issue of growing economic inequality moved to the political center stage, he advocated for closing corporate tax loopholes and reversing tax cuts for the wealthiest Californians to protect and expand opportunities for children, the poor, and working families.

As Treasurer, Mr. Angelides served as a trustee for California’s two major pension funds with assets of more than $300 billion; managed the State’s $57 billion investment fund; financed over 100,000 units of affordable housing and $150 billion in schools, transportation, parks and other public projects; and earned record returns on state investments.

Mr. Angelides is a graduate of Harvard University (B.A. cum laude, 1974) and was a Coro Foundation Fellow. He served from 1975 to 1983 in California government, where he was a policy leader in affordable housing, urban planning and redevelopment, and infrastructure investment.

He entered the private sector in 1984 and, in 1986, formed his own real estate investment business, which pioneered the planning and building of smart growth, sustainable communities – years before those terms were in common usage. Among his projects was the community of Laguna West, located south of the City of Sacramento, one of the first developments in the country to the put the principles of New Urbanism into practice. It was featured in, among other publications, Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, U.S. News and World Report and ABC-TV’s Good Morning America and helped spark a national dialogue around building more livable, environmentally responsible communities. His most recent project – the new urban residential neighborhood of McKinley Village in the heart of the Sacramento region – has received 31 awards from local, state, and national organizations for it design, parks and public spaces, and public art. His company has planned and developed communities that have provided over 20,000 new homes and has been involved in the development of utility scale solar energy generation projects that provide enough power for more than 100,000 homes.

Mr. Angelides has been active in the civic life of his community, state, and nation for more than four decades. He was the Democratic nominee for Governor of California in 2006. He was Chairman of the California Democratic Party from 1991 to 1993, leading a united Democratic campaign in 1992 that turned California from red to blue - electing two women senators (Senators Boxer and Feinstein) for the first time in any state’s history and carrying the state for a Democratic presidential candidate (Bill Clinton) for the first time in 28 years. In his hometown of Sacramento, he served as the Chairman of the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Commission and as Co-Chair of the Sacramento Mayor’s Commission on Education and the City’s Future where he led a bi-partisan civic effort to turn around the troubled Sacramento City Unified School District.

From 2007 to 2011, Mr. Angelides served as Chairman of the Apollo Alliance, a national coalition of business, labor, environmental and community leaders committed to building a clean energy, good jobs economy. He currently serves as a board member of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, the BlueGreen Alliance, and GetLit and on the Advisory Board of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at UCLA School of Law.

Mr. Angelides has received numerous awards for his work, including the National Inner City Leadership Award from the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City; the Congress for the New Urbanism’s Lifetime Achievement Award; the California League of Conservation Voters’ Environmental Leadership Award; Ceres' Joan Bavaria Award for Building Sustainability into the Capital Markets; the Local Environmental Leadership Award from Global Green, presented by Mikhail Gorbachev; the BlueGreen Alliance’s Visionary Award; and induction into the California Housing Consortium’s Housing Hall of Fame.

Mr. Angelides and his wife, Julie, have three daughters – Megan, Christina, and Arianna – and six grandchildren – Alexandra, Isabella, Elodie, Max, Zoe, and Luca.