Op-eds on JoePa’s salary
Nov 28th, 2007 by dani_k
A story in Thursday’s Centre Daily Times details the many steps that must be taken before SERS can release Penn State salary information. Remember, the ruling said that only salaries of Penn State employees participating in SERS are ruled as state employees - and the CDT had some interesting figures we haven’t seen anywhere else: exactly how many PSU employees are now officially “state employees”: 6,252 people— or 36 percent of full-time Penn State employees. According to SERS spokesman Robert Genzel, SERS has already begun to field multiple requests for employee salary data at the university. He would not say how many requests have been filed since Tuesday. But he said he is sending each request to the SERS legal counsel for review.
On Friday, The Patriot-News editorialized on the Supreme Court’s PSERS/Penn State salary decision, noting “This ruling doesn’t require Penn State, which is exempt from the state’s Right to Know Act, to provide salary information. Rather, it directs SERS, which is included under the law, to make the information publicly available.”
On Saturday, the Erie Times News suggested that maybe the Supreme Court could “help educate legislators about open records.”
On Sunday, the Sunbury Daily Item agreed that Paterno’s pay should be open to public scrutiny. And the Chambersburg Public Opinion called the ruling “a breath of fresh air.”
Monday’s York Daily Record called the ruling “a victory for freedom of information - one of the small victories that have occurred as the public and governments wrangle over access to information,” and calls for the state Legislature to overhaul our public records laws.
And on Tuesday, the Easton Express Times said “The high court’s ruling feels like the first rays of sunlight after a long winter. We can only hope it serves as a foundation for the Legislature’s ongoing attempt to rewrite and shore up the state’s open records law, regarded as the weakest such statute in the nation. The state House is expected to take up this debate when it returns Dec. 3, and it’s imperative that lawmakers reject their previous attempts to water down the reform bill.”