The New York City Employee Retirement System (NYCERS) must provide the Empire Center with names and amounts of pensions paid to retired New York City uniformed employees, such as corrections officers, a Kings County Supreme Court judge ruled today.
“If taxpayers are responsible for funding pensions, then the taxpayers deserve to see what they are,” said Tim Hoefer, executive director of the Empire Center. “The Empire Center will continue to take on and win these fights as long as people are trying to hide this type of data from the public.”
The Empire Center sued to obtain the data last year after the system refused to properly follow the Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) and instead moved to conceal the pensions from the public.
Hoefer pointed to the recent New York Daily News stories about disability pension abuse as proof of the importance of letting New Yorkers examine the public pension rolls.
The ruling marks the fourth consecutive court win for the Empire Center in two years, which was victorious in Freedom of Information Law cases involving the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), the NYC Fire Department Pension Fund and the New York City and New York State Teachers’ Retirement Systems.
The Empire Center, based in Albany, is an independent, non-profit, non-partisan think tank dedicated to promoting policies to make New York a better place to live, work and do business.