Pension fix on track

One area of the fiscal 2018 budget that the House and Senate won’t have to spend time arguing over is an effort to transfer control of the underperforming MBTA pension fund to the larger state employee fund. It’s a bit of bright news on what is otherwise a gloomy budget landscape.

With the release of the Senate budget plan last week, Beacon Hill officially reached agreement that the T’s retirement fund needs a bailout — at least, an administrative one. The House, Senate and Gov. Charlie Baker now have all adopted budget language that authorizes the state Pension Reserves Investment Management board to manage the T’s retirement investments.

They can’t mandate a takeover, given that the T fund is organized as a private trust (which is a huge source of the problem). So it will require some additional effort to make this happen.

But there are benefits aplenty to having PRIM manage the T’s assets. For starters, they just seem to be better at it. The T fund’s asset balance dropped 7 percent between 2005 and 2014, for example — at a time when the state retirement fund increased by 32 percent.

The T fund long resisted pressure to throw open its books, to invite public scrutiny of its investment decisions — never mind to relinquish management control. But the fund overseers have a fiduciary duty to plan participants, whose prospects would likely improve with this change.

Democratic lawmakers deserve credit for agreeing to take up this cause. Now they — along with MBTA workers and retirees who are on the short end of this arrangement — need to convince the fund to go along.

There are other reforms that Baker pitched in his budget that the House and Senate ignored (for example, a cap on the amount of sick time that state retirees can cash out). Those are missed opportunities. Still, the T pension fund reform is a good one to get over the goal line.