It’s Secrecy Week in the state Senate
As the clock ticks down towards Thursday’s adjournment of the state Legislature, Senate Republican leaders apparently are blocking a vote on a bill designed to ensure that the names of New York’s public pension recipients are (once again) unequivocally treated as public information.
As recounted here last week, the bill sailed through the Assembly on a 137-1 vote and was introduced in the upper house by Sen. Martin Golden, R-Brooklyn, himself the recipient of a $29,000-a-year NYPD disability pension. The bill was referred to the Committee on Investigations and Government Operations, chaired by Sen. Carl Marcellino– and there, as of this morning, it remains. Golden publicly has expressed support for the measure; assuming he really means it, the bill’s failure to move must reflect opposition from Marcellino, or Majority Leader Dean Skelos, or other members of the Senate Rules Committee, which has the power to dislodge the legislation and bring it to a vote on the floor.
So what’s the real story? Perhaps someone in the news media will ask the Senate Republicans for an explanation.
Meanwhile, using last year’s Appellate Division ruling in a New York City Police Pension Fund case, all of the city’s pension funds and the large New york State Teachers’ Retirement System have begun treating the names of pension recipients as a secret.
Perhaps the problem is this:
A: They are tired of people like you taking pension outliers and crying that they are the “norm”.
B: When it comes right down to it, the pension trust fund, which pensions are paid out of, are no more public funds than a companies 401k portfolio for it’s employees. Why? Because those funds belong to the employees, not the employer.
If people like you would stop abusing FOIL laws for political purposes, maybe they wouldn’t be so disinclined to act. And let’s remember - it’s REPUBLICANS that are saying no. That really says something about the validity of the argument, because if they are saying no, it reflects just how egregious the abuse of the FOIL laws for political purposes really is by folks like yourself.
Comment by Darth Stateworker — June 19, 2012 @ 9:56 pm