It’s a safe bet that many people, seeing their work described in print as “among the worst in the country,” might cringe and try to avoid the media.

But David Eager has spent the past five years running the Kentucky Public Pension Authority, with an eye to turning the system around. A big part of his work has been increasing transparency and educating people about the nitty-gritty of public pensions, how Kentucky got into the mess it’s in, and how it’s going to get out.

Eager reached out to MarketWatch to talk more about his work. “There’s a good story to tell here, but it doesn’t get heard that often, and it’s going to take a long time for it to play out,” he said.

Public pensions often are referred to as “deferred compensation:” public-sector employees take lower salaries than they’d receive in the private sector in exchange for some certainty in retirement. It’s up to their employers — states, cities, school districts, transportation agencies, and so on — to provide that certainty. Kentucky has failed at that mandate on its roughly $12.8 billion pension system for more than a decade, as legislators declined to pay even half of what was needed to keep the system whole.

Eager spoke with MarketWatch about some of the policy changes he’s helped nudge the state to implement, what people often get wrong about pensions, and more.

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