The Carcieri administration is refusing to disclose the number of unused vacation and sick days it awarded recent state retirees who, in some cases, walked out the door with severance checks averaging $10,500, but running as high as the $129,158 paid to former Rhode Island College president John Nazarian.

In total, taxpayers paid $16.5 million in severance payments to the 1,521 state workers and college employees who retired in the five months before the price of health coverage for new state retirees went up on Oct. 1.

If all of the jobs were left vacant, the state would presumably save tens of millions of dollars in salaries and benefits. But first, the taxpayers have to pay the retirees for unused vacation and sick days, the deferred pay they were promised as a concession for taking a pay cut during the financial crisis of 1991 and, in some cases, the early-retirement bonuses of $7,000 to $20,000 offered to state college employees.

In a series of back-and-forth e-mails last week, Governor Carcieri’s spokeswoman, Amy Kempe, said the Department of Administration had decided that it was barred from releasing further details about the severance payments by the state Open Records Law, under an exemption for personally identifiable information.

Past administrations detailed the severance pay, for example, to former Lottery director John Hawkins, former court administrator Matthew Smith and Richard Mumford, a onetime associate commissioner of education.

In 2001, when Mumford, the husband of a Republican lawmaker, retired two months shy of his 59th birthday, he left with a $50,427 retirement incentive plus $81,964 in state payments that reflected 494.5 hours of unused vacation, 303.8 hours of unused sick time and the deferred payment of wages sliced from every state employees’ paycheck during the 1991 fiscal crisis. In total, the state disclosed at that time that Mumford left with a $132,392 in severance payments on top of his $5,554-a-month pension.

When asked yesterday why the Carcieri administration had shut off access to details of this nature, Kempe said: “I cannot answer as to why past administrations chose to not follow [the records law].”

She said someone she would not identify in “legal” had responded in this way to The Journal’s request for information about more recent retirees: “She is not entitled to be provided with employee information she seeks consisting of hours of unused sick time, vacation days, Sundlun deferral days, etc. That is because information that is not specifically exempted ... is exempt from disclosure.”

kgregg@projo.com