No privacy for public employees. Lucky for them.

Public Employees salaries are public.  The public has a right to know where their money goes.

Even your kind old first grade teacher?  Yes.  Even her.    And she should be grateful because the fact that it was public all along helps assure her that she gets to keep it.  Everyone all along the way had the chance to know what we were getting into.

Oregon's largest newspaper once again this year published a link to the database of the Oregon Public Retirement System recipients.

               http://gov.oregonlive.com/pers/ 

The database is user friendly.  It defaults to listing recipients in declining order of monthly payment but one can easily type in a name and see both the former employee's final salary and their current monthly benefit.

Pension debate

These employees were public employees.  The data here is a public record.  And PERS and its formulas generally are matters of public debate.  The Oregon legislature will find it difficult to fund current operations of education, roads, and other services, plus the costs of healthcare under Medicaid expansion, primarily because the pension program is underfunded currently.  Taxpayers need to make up the difference.  It is an expensive mess.

Duck coach Mike Bellotti

The primary impact of this report, especially since it defaults to showing the highest paid recipients first, will likely be public surprise and dismay at the high amounts of the payouts.  The big policy debate--how should Oregon handle its PERS obligations?--comes down to actual people getting paid actual benefits.  One cannot understand the big picture unless one understands the details.   What people were paid, how long they worked, and their payout are those details.   

Therefore, there is no privacy, even for the equipment operator on a road grader of a county public works department, nor for a 4th grade teacher in Myrtle Creek, nor a DMV records clerk in Salem.  Readers can look up their old high school teachers and see their PERS benefit.  

Some are public officials whose work put them in the public eye.  The second largest recipient is former Oregon football coach Mike Bellotti, undoubtably a public figure.  He got paid $1,320,000 a year in his final years as coach, which, when combined with the formula of years of service created a pension of some $536,000 a year.

Prolific Neurosurgeon

The highest paid person was an Oregon Health Sciences neurosurgeon who gets paid $55,000 a month in retirement, having earned $1,800,000 a year at the end of his 20 year career.   Is he a public figure?  Possibly anyone earning 1.8 million dollars a year from the public is, by definition, a public figure.  He was described as a "prolific" and "star" surgeon who left Oregon Health Sciences to go to a practice in Seattle where he carried out a high volume practice.  In his 16 months there he did 661 procedures and brought in fees to the hospital of $86 million dollars.   He also generated 49 complaints over his surgery practices, which put him into the news.   Presumably he is newsworthy and therefore a public figure.  

Our former schoolteachers are not, but they don't have privacy either.

Their salaries and payouts and photos lead the newspaper story.

Note that a 40 year employee, whose final salary was $77,000 receives $262,000 a year in retirement benefits.   The PERS formula strongly favors long careers.

Of the 121,000 recipients of PERS listed here, 526 receive more than $10,000 a month in income, a little fewer than one half of one percent.   That 526th highest paid person worked for 25 years, had a final salary of $96,000 a year and now receives $120,000, which is 125% of his former income.

A more typical employee, drawn from the midpoint of the 121,000 recipients, is a woman who worked 22 years, had a final salary of $68,000 a year, and draws $2,200 a month.   A former high school teacher of mine worked 30 years for the Medford schools, earned $42,000 a year when he retired young in 1995, and now gets $42,000 a year.   Another, who worked 30 years and earned $51,000, gets $62,000 a year.

Some people will consider it fair and reasonable, others will consider it too expensive. The Oregon courts said it was a contract and a deal is a deal.  What is undeniably true is that the contracts that awarded these pensions were public, were discussed at the time, reviewed and debated publicly over the past five decades, and were entered into by school boards and legislatures elected by the people of Oregon.  The deal was not private, it was public.

A deal is a deal

Therefore, there is an equivalence in lack of privacy:  public employees, working and retired, receive a benefit that was arrived at openly.  The searchable database is nothing new.  Neither retirees nor public can pretend surprise, either at the lack of privacy for people who perhaps expect it but simultaneously for the public who might look at the salaries and pensions and be surprised.  

People on both sides--public and employee--knew the deal.