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Assembly withholds payroll data

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It appears the Assembly doesn’t want the public looking too closely at its payroll.

In an interpretation of state open-records laws that bewilders experts, the Assembly’s chief administration officer is refusing a Times request for an electronic file of names and salaries of lawmaker staff.

The official, Jon Waldie, provided 4,600 names, hire dates, job titles and base salary figures as a hard copy only, spread across 64 pages of fine print. Waldie said the public has no right to the electronic file, which can be obtained for 230,000 other California government employees -- and can be used to identify and analyze hiring patterns in government.

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Waldie, the fourth-highest-paid Assembly employee with an annual salary of $174,900, said providing such records for legislative staff ‘would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.’’

Peter Scheer, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, a Bay Area nonprofit that promotes free speech and open government, says the Assembly is motivated by more than privacy concerns. ‘What they’re clearly doing is trying to provide the public with the information that it has a right to see, but deliberately offering it in a format that makes it all but impossible to use,’ he said.

Asked to cite the specific section of the legislative open-records act that allows him to keep electronic records from the public, Waldie told a reporter: ‘Send me your little e-mail and I’ll pass it along to our legislative counsel.’

The legislative open-records statute, which was written decades ago, stresses the public’s right to access information and does not address any difference between electronic and paper records.

Scheer, a Harvard-educated lawyer with expertise in suing government agencies to disclose records, sent Waldie a public records request for the electronic file Thursday afternoon.

New Assembly Speaker John Pérez (D-Los Angeles), who declared in his March 1 swearing-in speech, ‘the reality is that in a state like California, we need to have transparency in government,’ did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

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On his first day as speaker, Pérez gave his chief of staff, Sara Ramirez, a raise from $125,256 to $190,008, the top salary for Assembly staffers.

-- Jack Dolan

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