State Rep. Vicki Truitt says she may go back to the drawing board on legislation she sponsored this year that open-government advocates are criticizing as a slap to public interests.

House Bill 2460, which took effect Sept. 1, contains broad language that blocks the public from some financial information about municipal pensions, the critics say.

“What she needs to say is that she made a mistake and she’s going to go out and change the law she sponsored,” said Joe Larsen, board member of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas in Austin.

Truitt, R-Keller, said she’s going to see whether the law is being interpreted the way lawmakers intended. She said the goal was to open up information about public pensions that had been exempted from disclosure, while keeping confidential private information that could identify individuals. Several open-government advocates had supported the bill because it removed roadblocks to access, she noted.

“If there is a perceived problem with legislation, I’m always open to looking at it,” Truitt said.

Public pensions are a hot topic because many are underfunded and may need more taxpayer money to meet obligations. The law for first time allows overseers of municipal pensions to decide what information regarding members they will release. Truitt said that provision was included to avoid a flood of requests to Attorney General Greg Abbott’s office.

But in the first legal test of the new law last month, a state district judge in Austin ruled that the Fort Worth Employees’ Retirement Fund has sole discretion to determine what information it will release to the public regarding public pension recipients, and there was no avenue of appeal.

At issue was information on lump-sum payments to recent Fort Worth city retirees that was requested by the Star-Telegram. The attorney general’s office had said that individuals’ names were confidential, but told the fund to release information on their ages, departments, years of service and amount of payouts. The fund then sued, and the court ruled that the new law doesn’t allow the attorney general or the courts to review such decisions by municipal pension administrators.

Truitt said she was baffled by the Austin judge’s interpretation of the law. The legislation was never intended to give public pensions carte blanche over information, she said.

She said she expects to study the ruling and statutes.

Pensions that deny public access to aggregate financial information — data that doesn’t identify individuals — could be at risk of breaking the law, she said.

Larsen, who is a media attorney in Houston, said Truitt shouldn’t be shocked at the judge’s ruling.

“It’s not miscarriage of justice; it’s not a legal error,” Larsen said. The judge “ruled according to the letter of the law sponsored by Vicki Truitt,” he said. “She needs to go back and fix it, is what the bottom line is.”

The next regular session of the Legislature is in 2013.