10/9/2011: Editor Peter Bhatia of the Oregonian has a long thoughtful editorial on their successful battle to make PERS payouts public:
Our interest, going into this process, was examining PERS recipients who retired at pensions higher than their salaries (some receiving more than $100,000 annually from PERS). And we are also interested in double dipping — the commonly allowed practice of state employees retiring, beginning to collect their pensions, then being rehired on contract for the very same or similar job.
Many UO administrators do this with 1029 hour deals. The info will be public as of 11/21.
The odd thing about this whole discussion about what “taxpayers pay in salaries to public employees” is that only 6% of the UO budget is paid by taxpayers. Maybe a much higher percentage of that is for salaries, but really, we are approaching not be public at all.