Court: County Must Turn Over Pension Data

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) -- A state appeals court ruled Wednesday that Sacramento County's pension system must hand over information about who receives benefits and how much they get. The ruling upheld a lower court decision in a lawsuit filed by The Sacramento Bee.

A three-judge panel of the Third District Court of Appeals said the Sacramento County Employees Retirement System must disclose the names of its members and how much they receive in benefits.

However, it does not have to turn over other data about retirees, such as addresses, telephone numbers or Social Security numbers.

The Bee and the First Amendment Coalition sued the system after a public records request for the information was denied. The newspaper said that without the details, it was nearly impossible to investigate possible pension abuses such as "spiking," where boosting compensation in a worker's last year on the job leads to higher benefits throughout their retirement.

The pension system said it was protecting its members by withholding the information, and it had a responsibility to keep that data confidential. The retirement system lost the case in a lower court and filed an appeal despite a July 2010 letter from Sacramento County supervisors urging the release of the information.

It was unclear Wednesday whether the retirement system would appeal again. Chief executive Richard Stensrud and general counsel James Line were out of the office and could not be reached for comment.

The court decision was faithful to a 2007 California Supreme Court ruling that the state Public Record Act requires the disclosure of public employee salaries, and to the principle that the public has a right to know how much a public employee makes, whether that's in salary or in pension, said Karl Olson, a San Francisco lawyer who represented the news organizations.

(Copyright 2011 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)