LOIS HENRY: Pension information is public, then and now
| Saturday, Jul 24 2010 11:20 AM
Last Updated Saturday, Jul 24 2010 11:20 AM
The public should not have to lawyer up and sue everyone to smithereens just to know how much we're paying our employees. Both during their working years and in retirement.
That's money the government yanks out of our pockets whether we like it or not and the trade-off is we get to know how every dime is spent. Period. End of story.
Over my many years in this business, however, I've been constantly amazed at the lengths government agencies will go to, whether spurred on by public employee unions or not, in order to keep that information hidden.
Really, it's borderline pathological.
Even in the face of a unanimous 2007 California Supreme Court decision that absolutely states public employee compensation is public, agencies still won't cough up pension information.
And how is that not taxpayer funded compensation? Do fairies come in the middle of the night and sprinkle public employees with magic retirement dust?
Come on.
Now, state and local agencies are cutting the most basic services and we're hearing more and more that overly generous pension benefits are sucking up what little resources we have left.
City of Bakersfield voters will be asked this November to decide the level of benefits for future firefighters and police officers.
There has never been a more critical time for the public to understand how the pension systems it funds work -- or don't.
And STILL, the agencies in charge of those systems don't want to give out that information.
In answer to The Californian's most recent requests, the Kern County Employee Retirement Association responded that it would think about it.
Bakersfield sent us to the California Public Employee Retirement System, CalPERS, which said it might give us some information but not all we'd asked for.
Here's what we want to know:
Name, date of birth, department, base salary in final year of employment, date pension started, type of pension, gross retirement allowance per month.
Interestingly, retirement agencies used to balk at the pension amount. These days, it's the names and birthdates that seem to cause heartburn.
People are worried about identity theft or other mischief if names and ages are known.
Oh, hooey.
As The Californian successfully argued in our lawsuit some years ago to shake loose firefighter compensation so we could explore how departments doled out overtime, the federal government has been giving out that information for more than 20 years and no horrors had befallen any employees.
We ultimately obtained that information, published numerous stories and have never heard of any negative consequences from that effort. In its 2007 decision, the Supreme Court noted there had never been a single example of public employees endangered by release of their names and salaries.
Even so, why do we want names and ages?
So we can distinguish between employees and decipher who's getting how much in retirement and at what age they're retiring.
It's pertinent information, particularly as employees retire younger and live longer.
Other papers have discovered nuggets of great public interest when names are included. For instance, in Orange County, former Sheriff Michael Carona is collecting more than $200,000 a year in pension checks while he's out on bail pending his appeal of a felony conviction for witness tampering.
Hmm. I'm pretty sure plenty of Kern County taxpayers would like to know exactly how much we're paying former county Public Health Director B.A. Jinadu, who retired in 2007 after he was accused of overbilling Medi-Cal through several private clinics he owned. He left Kern owing the state $354,572.
That's right, he gets a public pension. But we don't get to know how much because the Kern retirement agency won't say.
They fall back on code section 31532, that says individual records are secret. They, and other so-called 1937 act counties, include any records that can be tied to an individual's benefits.
But courts in other parts of the state are looking at that code section and reading it differently. They've found it only applies to records filed by the individual in regards to their personal information, not records that pertain to publicly funded benefits paid to those individuals.
In Sacramento County, where the most recent ruling came down, the Sacramento County Employees' Retirement System has appealed, saying it has already given out pension amounts, retirement dates, length of service, and employers at retirement and that is sufficient for public oversight.
They are drawing the line at names.
It's always funny to me when any public agency dictates how much information about its operations is "sufficient for oversight."
Phil Franey, retired Treasurer/Tax Collector for Kern and an alternate board member on the Kern retirement agency, said he also would be willing to release certain information to aid in the public's understanding of the inner workings of Kern's pension system, which he described as very conservative and tightly run.
No names, however.
"I do think a lot of that information would be fair to release," he said. Particularly as it would show the public the vast majority of public retirees don't earn anywhere near the huge amounts that have made headlines recently.
"Only 2 to 3 percent of our retirees earn over $100,000 a year," he said. "Around 46 percent get less than $20,000 a year."
He's tired, he said, of public employees being vilified and especially tired of the very elected officials who granted the generous benefits now "screaming and yelling that they're too expensive.
"You can't have it both ways."
He also noted that, so far, all the lawsuits ordering release of pension information have been county superior courts, meaning their findings aren't binding on Kern. (i.e., if we want the info, we're probably gonna have to go to court to get it.)
Getting back to that names thing, and here's where being old and cantankerous can be so much fun, I dusted off a project I worked on in 1994 about pension reform.
It included a story detailing how we got the information and, whaddaya know? Back then, the Kern retirement agency freely gave us 15 years worth of the following data:
Retiree names, types of retirements and years of service. They withheld how much each retiree received in disability pensions.
Around the same time, though, the county gave the Bakersfield Chamber of Commerce nearly the exact same information, only they included pension amounts and excluded names.
By its own precedent, the Kern retirement agency has already divulged exactly the information we're currently asking for.
Great! So we don't have to go to court, the public can truly have oversight of its own money and all is right with the world, yes? Yes?
Anyhoo, the city and CalPERS, back in 1994, at first gave us the runaround too. They both said they didn't have any of the information we sought.
But our "charm" finally won them over and they gave up, bit by painful bit, as I recall, names, years of service, monthly pension amounts, type of retirement, worker's compensation awards, retirement dates, birth dates, employment classifications and departments from which employees retired.
So fair warning, we will keep after this.
P.S. For all of you squaring your jaws and muttering that maybe I should let the public peek into my pension: 1) I work in the private sector, no one collects taxdollars to fund my check and 2) I don't have a pension, I have something called a 401(k) that I pay into all on my own. And with this economy, that means you can expect me to be writing about this issue well past retirement age -- whatever that is.
Opinions expressed in this column are those of Lois Henry, not The Bakersfield Californian. Her column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. Comment at people.bakersfield.com/home/Blog/noholdsbarred, call her at 395-7373 or e-mail lhenry@bakersfield.com
