By Robert Lewis —The Sacramento Bee and the First Amendment Coalition on Thursday filed a lawsuit in Sacramento Superior Court to compel the Sacramento County Employees’ Retirement System to release the names of retirees getting pensions greater than $100,000 annually.In the past year, The Bee has tried to get a list of the top earners, but SCERS officials have refused, calling such information confidential. That determination came despite recent court rulings in Contra Costa and Stanislaus counties that found in favor of newspapers. In those cases, judges required the county pension systems in question to release the names of top pensioners.”From a legal point of view, there’s no difference between pension amounts and salary amounts,” said Peter Scheer, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition. “The public shouldn’t have to continuously litigate this.”
The California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the pension system for state employees, also considers such information public and recently released an updated list of its “$100,000 Club.”
“(T)he records sought are most assuredly public records. They are not a letter from a friend, or a public employee’s shopping list, but rather records which show how tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds have been or will be spent,” according to The Bee’s suit.
In a July 16, 2009, letter to The Bee rejecting a request for the top pensioners’ names, SCERS attorney Jim Line wrote that as recently as 2005, the Sacramento Superior Court decided “that personal identifiers for retirees (‘names’ in that case) are not required to be provided in response to a request for public records.”
In an e-mail to The Bee on Thursday, Line wrote: “We believe that the County Employees’ Retirement Law, and our fiduciary obligations, require us to keep such information confidential.”
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