PROVIDENCE — In the face of criticism from the American Civil Liberties Union, the Carcieri administration is defending — but also backing off slightly — from its earlier decision to withhold from public view all of the nitty-gritty details behind $16.5 million in severance payments to recent state retirees, including the many weeks of “unused sick time” for which the departing state workers were paid.

That is how much the state had to shell out over the last month to the 1,521 state workers and college employees who retired in the five months before the price of health coverage to new state retirees went up on Oct. 1, according to a rundown the Carcieri administration made public yesterday.

Such details have historically been public, but Governor Carcieri’s administration initially refused to make any information public except the gross amount paid to each. The payments averaged a reported $10,500 but ranged as high as the $129,158 paid to retired Rhode Island College President John Nazarian.

About 10 others got checks for more than $50,000, including former University of Rhode Island provost Beverly Swan, former state controller Lawrence Franklin, former Senate fiscal adviser Russell Dannecker and the former chief auditor at the Department of Transportation, James Choquette. Many more got checks for $30,000, $40,000 and more.

The administration’s refusal to detail how it arrived at any of these payments prompted this response from Steven Brown, executive director of the Rhode Island chapter of the ACLU: “The open records law was specifically amended many years ago to ensure public access to precisely this type of information — the payment of tax dollars to government employees.

“This is just the latest in a long line of actions by this administration to conceal clearly public information from the taxpayers,” Brown said.

Carcieri spokeswoman Amy Kempe said there would be no response to Brown’s comments. But earlier this week, Kempe said unnamed lawyers may have initially “erred on the side of caution,” out of what she described as “some significant concerns about the privacy of recent retirees.”

Asked what privacy concern a retiree might have about getting paid again, on their way out the door, for workdays they did not call in sick, she had no response.

But she said the governor’s key advisers — including current and past directors of the Department of Administration, Jerome Williams and Beverly Najarian — reconsidered the state’s position and decided the state could disclose how much of each severance check reflects unused vacation or sick time, the deferred pay state employees were promised they would get at retirement in exchange for pay cuts during the 1991 banking crisis, and the retirement-incentives offered certain state college and university retirees. She said the state’s computer team is working on a program to produce the information.

In the past, the state has made public the number of hours of unused sick leave and vacation time for which a retired employee had been credited. Kempe said the Carcieri administration is not willing to go that far out of continuing concerns for “privacy.”

State workers are entitled to bank up to 125 unused sick days for use if and when they need it and then, at retirement, cash in the value of about one-third of those unused days. Defenders say the ability to “bank” sick days is the only way state workers without the same temporary-disability coverage available to private-sector workers can count on getting paid during an extended illness.

In 2006, Carcieri proposed banning payments for unused sick time and limiting the amount of unused vacation time a state worker can carry over from one year to the next. Lawmakers refused to go along. Kempe did not say whether he would try again.

kgregg@projo.com