MERS denies FOIA request for Rick Jones' pension amount

MERS denies FOIA request for Rick Jones' pension amount

July 22, 2019

From the MERS website: "The Municipal Employees' Retirement System (MERS) of Michigan is an independent, professional retirement services company that was created to administer the retirement plans for Michigan's local units of government on a not-for-profit basis." MERS provides retirement services to 929 local units of government, 746 of which have defined benefit programs.

In May, I submitted a FOIA request for Rick Jones' pension amount. I'd posted a story about the race for Eaton County sheriff, and wanted to confirm the amount Jones gave me. MERS denied my request:

In my June 8 appeal to the MERS Board, I said

Your legal department has misinterpreted this law. While it is true that information regarding the calculation is exempt, the pension amount is not. I will give you two examples that illustrate this interpretation.

For its August 10, 2017 story “Overtime spikes pensions for dozens of Lansing police, fire retirees” the Lansing State Journal obtained from the City of Lansing the pension amounts for about 160 retired police and firefighters. The story says that

The city cited a 2012 law that shields pension calculation information from public records requests when it did not release final average compensation numbers to the State Journal.

However, the State Journal obtained from the city base wage and pension amounts for every police and fire retiree between 2010 and 2016 through a public records request.

More recently, the Michigan Office of Retirement Services provided pension amounts for all state retirees to an outfit named American Transparency. The August 2017 email to retirees (including me) is below:

You'd think the MERS board would be persuaded by the fact that the City of Lansing and the state Office of Retirement Services did not think state law exempted pension amounts from the FOIA. But no. They denied my appeal at their June 27 meeting:

The board meeting minutes provide no detail on the discussion of my appeal:

Here is the MERS board:

I considered filing a lawsuit, but the last time I did that, I lost and it cost me $3,376.62. That was last year, against the City of Lansing. But the one other time I sued, I won, and that time it was against MERS. They had denied my request for "confidential" termination agreements signed by several former MERS employees. That was in 2005. (I retired from MERS in 2004.) It cost MERS a total of $12,013.50. $6,426 was for my attorney fees, $500 was the penalty required by the Act for improperly denying the request, and $5,887 was what MERS paid contract attorney Lisa Ward for handling the lawsuit. That story is here.

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