April 30, 2009

Salary Secrecy Bill Is Insult to Taxpayers

by Rep. Susan Austin

Last year, the cause of openness and honesty in state government took a big step forward. A website called MaineOpenGov.org was created to post the names and salaries of everyone on the public payroll – some 90,000 people, including state employees, school employees and other public employees.

The site caused a big stir. The salary information was already in the public domain, but the website made it easily accessible. As a general principle, the public has a right to know who is working for state government and how much they are paid. After all, the taxpaying public foots the bill. Indeed, the term “public employee” says it all. If they work for the public, the people paying their salaries expect full disclosure. It’s all part of keeping government honest and accountable.

The website was such a major advance towards openness in government that the site’s manager, the Maine Heritage Policy Center (MHPC), was recently voted the winner of the Sunshine Award, presented annually by the Maine Freedom of Information Coalition. The award recognized that the MHPC was performing a valuable public service by making sure public spending was transparent, a Maine tradition that dates back to the earliest town meetings.

Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for the forces of censorship and secrecy to strike back. A bill now moving through the Legislature, LD 1353, would hide the names of all employees on the public payroll – town managers, road commissioners, teachers, state workers and all the rest. The bill is sponsored by nine legislators, all Democrats. The chief sponsor, Senator Lisa Marrache, of Waterville, defended the bill in a column in the Kennebec Journal. She said the practice of publicly identifying the names and salaries of government employees was “sleazy.”

One of the bill’s cosponsors, Senate President Elizabeth “Libby” Mitchell, of Vassalboro, was quoted in one article as saying the website is an attempt to “harass and embarrass” government employees. The key word here is embarrass.

The insiders in Augusta were not happy when Mainers began combing through the website and finding some very interesting facts about the state payroll. They looked at the governor’s salary, for example, which comes in at about $70,000. Then they discovered that 2,041 state workers make more money than the chief executive. That means 15 percent of state employees make more than the governor.

Overtime pay is another eye-opener. According to data on the website, 413 state employees racked up more than $10,000 in overtime last year. The total overtime compensation of these same employees was more than $19 million, which works out to an average of just over $46,000 apiece. Some of these workers earned more in overtime than they made in their regular salaries.

With information like that easily available to a population already hopping mad about high taxes, it’s no wonder the Augusta insiders are trying to put a chokehold on transparency. But this time they are hitting resistance. It is a rare event when the editorial writers of Maine newspapers attack a bill proposed by a Democrat, but they have come down on this one like an avalanche.

The Brunswick Times Record editorialized that the Marrache legislation “would put this state back in the dark ages with respect to Maine’s Freedom of Access law.” It called LD 1353 “a misguided piece of legislation that deserves a quick death at the committee level with a unanimous ‘ought not to pass’ recommendation stamped across the document.”

The Lewiston Sun Journal weighed in with this critique: “Public workers are paid with taxes and fees wrestled from our collective pockets. We have an absolute right to know where that money is spent – every penny of it.”

The Ellsworth American was just as blunt. In an editorial of April 16, the editors wrote: “The effort by Marrache, Mitchell and their Democratic colleagues to impose such secrecy is an insult to the hundreds of thousands of Mainers who have every right to such detailed salary information.”

The Marrache bill is officially entitled “An Act Regarding Salary Information for Public Employees.” This attempt to turn Maine government into a secret society is a disgrace to the Legislature and should be defeated.

State Rep. Susan Austin (R-Gray) serves on the Business, Research and Economic Development Committee

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