There is no excuse now. The 3rd District Court of Appeal has denied the Sacramento County employee retirement board's petition for a rehearing of the court's decision last month, ordering the board to make public the names and pension amounts it pays to individual retirees.
The Sacramento Bee and the First Amendment Coalition sued last year for the information and won, first at the trial court level and in the appellate court last month.
Now the appellate court has affirmed its ruling for a second time.
It's time for the county retirement board to stop stalling and frittering away money that Sacramento County's retirement fund can ill afford to lose.
That money comes not just from county employees and retirees, but taxpayers, too. Taxpayers have a right to know what they are paying for.
Sacramento County, like local governments across the state, has faced brutal budget challenges for several years. Supervisors have been forced to cut jobs and strip support from the county's most vulnerable residents.
In the midst of the annual struggle to close large budget gaps, pension costs have been soaring.
The Sacramento Board of Supervisors just approved a budget that included a $278 million pension bill. That's $60 million or some 27 percent more than the county spent on its pension obligations just five years ago.
The public has every right to know how much the county pays in pensions to its retirees in total and who exactly gets how much in benefits.
In its latest petition to the court, the board sought to severely limit the data it released.
The board's attorney argued that it did not have to give the names of departments that retirees worked for, their position at retirement, years of service or even the date of their retirement.
Of course, all of this information is crucial for any fair assessment of the pension system. Without it, the public would be unable to compare pension payouts among departments, or between rank and file, and management.
The public would not be able to track the growth of pension benefits over time or determine how a particular individual pension was calculated. This information is indispensable to detect fraud, spiking and other pension abuses.
The state's two largest pension systems, the California Public Employees' Retirement System and the California State Teachers' Retirement System, release this information routinely.
Other counties do as well.
The Sacramento County retirement board needs to comply with the 3rd District appellate court's order forthwith.
If they fail to do so, the Board of Supervisors should ask the four retirement board members that the supervisors appoint to step down and then name new board members who will respect the courts and the public's right to know.