EDITORIAL: Keep pension records open

The assault on open government never stops — not even during Sunshine Week.

A little more than a year ago, the Nevada Supreme Court delivered one of the most important public records rulings in state history. The court ruled unanimously that records related to government retirees — their names, their work histories, their pension payments — must be disclosed to taxpayers. The Nevada Public Employees Retirement System, the agency that runs the state’s pension program, had long deemed the records confidential under a flawed interpretation of existing state law. Agency leaders asserted that although all public employee payrolls are open to inspection, those same workers could disappear from the public record the moment they retired, even as they collected a taxpayer-supported pension, even as taxpayers make ever-greater contributions to those pensions to keep them solvent.

The Reno Gazette-Journal sued PERS over the agency’s refusal to release pension records that are subject to public scrutiny across the rest of the country. The newspaper won its case and last year, after months of stalling, PERS finally started releasing limited pension data.

PERS resisted transparency — and still fights it to this day — because of political considerations. Its beneficiaries didn’t want the public to know their retirements were so generous. Its administrators knew that if pension information were made public — including easily abused perks that allow government workers to spike their benefits and retire at a younger age — it would create momentum for significant PERS reforms, including the eventualy phase-out of the defined-benefit program. Indeed, Republican majorities in the Legislature have introduced bills to bring government retirement benefits more in line with those offered in the private sector.

Transparency leads to accountability. Government secrecy, on the other hand, leads to corruption. That’s why Sunshine Week, which runs through Saturday, celebrates open government and access to public information.

And that’s why the Legislature’s minority Democrats want to build all-new barriers to PERS data. This week, they introduced Senate Bill 356, which would completely undo that Supreme Court ruling by amending state law: “Every record or file, and information contained therein, related to a member, retired employee or beneficiary is confidential and is not a public book or record.” The bill is sponsored by nine of the Senate’s 10 Democrats — every single one except Tick Segerblom of Las Vegas — as well as Assembly Democrats Amber Joiner, Ellen Spiegel, Michael Sprinkle, Richard Carrillo and Nelson Araujo. These lawmakers do not want you to know how much public employees are paid in retirement.

Majority Republicans should hijack SB356 and amend it to accomplish the opposite of what Democrats want: Not only must the bill declare PERS records public, PERS should be required to set new standards in pension transparency by posting beneficiary data in a searchable online database for all to see — without submitting records requests. That would be an appropriate tribute to Sunshine Week.