The $1.5 billion pension fund has 5,786 bus and train divers, track workers, and other employee members, reports the Boston Globe. And there are 6,685 retirees participating in the fund. Those numbers aren’t sustainable. Apart from numbers that look hard to reconcile, the fund is now embroiled in a bit of a scandal. Beth Healy reports at the Globe:
Michael Mulhern took home $2.2 million in compensation as chief of the MBTA Retirement Fund in the eight years after the financial crisis, including $216,329 in 2016, when he worked just seven months.
The compensation, released in response to a records request by the Globe, included pay for unused vacation time, representatives of the pension fund said. Based on his prior year’s pay rate, that would be about $50,000 for accrued vacation.
Mulhern stepped down as executive director of the $1.5 billion pension fund for transit workers at the beginning of August, after a tumultuous period during which the retirement board came under fire for its lack of transparency and for controversial accounting practices.
Mulhern was 57 when he resigned last summer, after a decade on the job. He retired in 2005 from the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, where he had worked his way up from bus driver to general manager.
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