When signing into law this year’s $36.5 billion state budget a few weeks ago, outgoing Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick vetoed a provision that would have repealed a transparency law aimed at the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority’s pension fund. Though publicly funded, the MBTA Retirement Fund is structured as a “private” trust set up to manage pensions for 12,000 current and former transit workers.

For decades, the MBTA Retirement Fund’s board and management have been spurning calls for transparency. They have exploited the fund’s legal status to claim exemption from “terrifying” regulations such as open-meeting and public records laws, as well as the ethics rules that apply to government agencies.

The MBTA contributes over $55 million annually to the fund, money that comes from fares and dedicated taxes. Moreover, the T is responsible for covering three quarters of any underfunding. MBTA Retirement Fund assets matched only 68 percent of liabilities at yearend 2012, reflecting a shortfall of well over $700 million racked up over just a few years.

After much prodding by the Boston Herald last summer, the MBTA, not the fund itself, released benefit data about the system’s members. Amid the public outrage over the retirement board’s recalcitrance, state Sen. William Brownsberger (D-Belmont), chair of the Joint Committee on Public Service, last year proposed legislation that would apply public records laws to any public-employee pension fund that takes government money. The bill passed with flying colors and was signed into law by Gov. Patrick as part of the state budget for fiscal 2014.

But the retirement board continued to reject requests for financial records by the local ABC affiliate and the Boston Globe. Both then appealed to the Office of the Secretary of State), which has jurisdiction over public records law enforcement.

Bizarrely, the Secretary of State refused to enforce the new law and compel the fund to release the financial data, citing early 1990s court rulings relating to another spat between the Globe and the MBTA Retirement Fund over financial disclosure. A close reading of the rulings in question shows nothing that would preclude enforcement of the Brownsberger amendment.

Meanwhile, the Globe revealed that the MBTA Retirement Fund had lost $25 million on a hedge fund investment recommended by an executive director with a deep conflict of interest, then failed to disclose the loss in its annual report for at least two years. Legislative hearings followed in February, at which the fund’s executive director came out in force, surrounded by lobbyists, lawyers, and MBTA union officials, all supportive of the fund’s secretiveness.

As if things couldn’t get any stranger, as part of this year’s budget bill Sen. Brownsberger subsequently proposed to repeal his own transparency law from the previous year in exchange for promises of a better annual report from the retirement fund. The cosponsor of the repeal was Senate Minority Leader Bruce Tarr (R-Gloucester).

Gov. Patrick, the only leading state official involved who’s not running for reelection this year, summarily vetoed the repeal, calling it a “step back” in transparency and dismissed claims that the original law lacked teeth: “There are questions being raised about whether the existing law is sustainable,” he said. “We think it is.”

In a scathing editorial, the Boston Herald summed up the Legislature’s “compromise” and the governor’s reaction thusly:

“Gov. Deval Patrick did the right thing by vetoing [the repeal]. And if lawmakers simply override that veto in favor of new, weaker disclosure requirements they will have proved once and for all that the notion of accountability on Beacon Hill is dead.”

Replacement language included in this year’s budget would require that the T release data on individual pensions. Pardon us for being underwhelmed, given that the T released that information last summer on its own. By repealing the stricter public records requirement, the Legislature would still leave fund administrators with the power to keep volumes of data secret.

It is hard to tell whether Brownsberger and other reform-minded legislators succumbed to electoral pressures or simply gave up from exhaustion in the face of the MBTA Retirement Fund’s taxpayer-funded lawyers and lobbyists. But the governor has now given them a final chance to expunge the disgrace of the MBTA Retirement Fund amendment by opening up the fund and reforming its broken governance.

Iliya Atanasov is the Pioneer Institute’s senior fellow on finance. His article originally appeared on the Manhattan Institute’s www.PublicSectorInc.org.