Finally acknowledging the looming disaster facing the state pension fund, Rhode Island Treasurer Frank Caprio last month recommended a reduction in the totally unrealistic 8.25 percent estimated rate of return on investments used to conceal the true scope of the massive unfunded liability in the state retirement system (“Pension fund projections revisited,” March 18).

The first question for Mr. Caprio is: “What took you so long?” Projected returns of 8.25 percent have been fantasy since well before he took office in 2007, with the actual rate of return averaging just 2.79 percent over the past 10 years.

In fact, Mr. Caprio knew better a long time ago. As early as April 2002, when he was Senate finance chairman, Mr. Caprio indicated that an 8.25 percent return had “proved to be an overly optimistic assumed rate of interest for the fund” (reported in The Journal on April 17, 2002). Nonetheless, throughout his career in the General Assembly and his tenure as treasurer, Mr. Caprio promulgated this budget fantasy to mask the truth from taxpayers and from public employees who will depend on the state pension fund to provide their retirement benefits.

As a candidate in the upcoming gubernatorial election, and with the pension fund in trouble, Mr. Caprio is working now to appear fiscally responsible, but he has a lot to explain about his two-decades-long political record of endangering the retirement of public employees and increasing the pressure on taxpayers to fill the holes in the fund.

In 1991, as a state representative, Mr. Caprio blindly followed disgraced Speaker Joseph DeAngelis in approving state budgets that were balanced by withholding more than $88 million in state payments to the pension fund — a practice that Mr. DeAngelis’s critics rightly identified as “looting” the fund. Then, in 2001, after Mr. Caprio climbed his way to the position of chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, he proposed legislation to let public employees vest after only five years of making contributions, rather than 10 years (01-S0176). A year later, in 2002, when the state had another budget deficit, Chairman Caprio’s solution was for the state to defer making payments to the pension fund again, even over the objections of Treasurer Paul Tavares, a fellow Democrat, that it would harm the pension fund.

Bad decision after bad decision simply dug the hole deeper for the rest of us, and now retirees have to fear for their financial futures, small businesses can barely stay afloat because of economic meltdown, and taxpayers — at least those who haven’t fled yet — have to foot the bill for yet another politician climbing to the top on their backs.

Mr. Caprio might respond that a few tens of millions of dollars here and there would not make much of a difference, and that it could have been worse, but is that really an acceptable answer from an elected official? It is also far from the truth. In fact, the $88 million that Mr. Caprio voted to withhold from the pension fund in 1991, assuming a more conservative 6 percent rate of return, would be worth more than $250 million over the two decades since that one bad decision was made.

Mr. Caprio might try to tell you that other states lost more money than we did, but is that really the standard we should set for ourselves? Wouldn’t it be nice to hear a leader explain how we can be the best, not simply take solace in the fact that someone else is worse off?

Mr. Caprio might try to tell you that as a young representative he didn’t have the political power or experience to do what was right, but isn’t that really the same excuse we’ve been hearing for every mess that the General Assembly leadership has caused for as long as we can remember? Wouldn’t it be refreshing to have a politician who does what’s right because he or she stands on principle and not political expediency?

Mr. Caprio will make excuses for the poor condition of the pension fund, but really what the taxpayers deserve is an apology from him for his role in helping put it in such a bad position. He owes it to the state workers whose retirement funds are teetering on the brink of insolvency. He owes it to the taxpayers who have paid and will continue to pay through the teeth for bad decisions made 20 or more years ago. He owes it to the small-business owners who struggle because of his part in our out-of-control state spending.

He owes it to an entire state that simply deserves better. In fact, the only money that seems to have been well-managed was his campaign account, but that is a story for another time.

After he apologizes, hopefully, he can spend some time trying to come up with a realistic solution to our pension mess rather than spending his time campaigning for governor, as he has been doing for the last four years as treasurer. But given his checkered record of dodging the hard decisions, I wouldn’t bank on it.

Giovanni D. Cicione is chairman of the Rhode Island Republican Party and a lawyer in private practice.