Public access to most government records and meetings is a legal right and a necessary right.
As taxpayers, we need to and should know how our money is being spent. Government and school officials at the city, county, state and federal levels get paid by us, use our money to build buildings and fund programs that are supposed to provide services we need. The reason state and federal “sunshine” laws give us access to public records is because sometimes we need to scrutinize them to determine how that money is being spent.
Most private citizens don’t have the wherewithal to do this. That’s one reason why you buy newspapers. The press, historically, has stood in for readers and viewers when something smells. We check out the numbers and we report what we find if it is awry.
Though public records and access to government meetings is a long tradition in Oregon, it’s not a popular concept with many public officials.
In recent years, public access to records and meetings has come under increasing attack. And in some cases, especially on the local level, the laws are simply ignored. It is not uncommon for a newspaper reporter, even from The New Era, to feel the need to inform officials about open meeting requirements or laws pertaining to the release of public records.
We hasten to add that, in recent years, our local city and school officials have been relatively circumspect in this area, which is commendable.
However, at higher levels of government, threats to the public’s right to know seem to continually pop up.
Right now, in Salem, legislators are considering two bills that would curtail that access. Neither has a bill number yet, but both are working their way through committee hearings in Salem.
One would close records listing the names and pension amounts paid to public employees through PERS, Oregon’s Public Employees Retirement System. The other would loosen restrictions on members of government bodies that are legally required to limit discussions of public business when a quorum (voting majority) is present, to open meetings. More on that shortly.
This PERS issue is not new. After years of PERS records being publicly available (without adverse consequences), PERS officials in 2002 made an arbitrary, internal decision to close the records of retirement benefits paid to public employees. Then-Attorney General Hardy Myers ruled in favor of the agency after The Oregonian newspaper protested – though numerous court decisions across the country have upheld public disclosure of this type of information.
When current Attorney General John Kroger took office in 2008, both The Oregonian and Salem’s Statesman-Journal asked him to reverse Myers’ ruling. Kroger did, but PERS then hired an outside attorney, at public expense, to sue the newspapers to keep the records private.
A settlement was reached last year and the records were released, but PERS then sent a letter to all 110,000 of its retired members telling them that “court judgments require PERS to disclose” the records, even though it agreed to the settlement.
As Oregonian editor Peter Bhatia noted, “Truth is, the settlement ensued because there really isn’t a legal argument that public pensions shouldn’t be public, just as the salaries of public employees are public.”
So now legislators are stepping up to get those records cut off from public purview. Retired public servants, perhaps not surprisingly, are not happy to have their pension payment amounts revealed to the public. But there is a reason why we should know if we have an interest in such – we’re paying those pensions.
Without that information, taxpayers have no way of knowing, for instance, that a local school district’s top administrator, just hired on a six-figure contract, recently retired from that same job at 105 percent of salary. They don’t know that a secretary who worked three days a week for 25 years and then went full time for the next three was able to retire on a PERS benefit calculated as if he or she had worked 28 years full time. Those are real-life scenarios.
The Oregonian has discovered that one individual on a Portland fire disability was serving in Iraq. Another was found taking a full firefighter pension for years after the city had paid to retrain him and he was working full time as a restaurant owner and chef.
What if a reporter wanted to determine how many police and fire employees work hundreds of hours in overtime their last few years to goose their pension payouts for life?
And what about PERS retirees who move to Vancouver to avoid Oregon income tax? Wouldn’t it be desirable, as a reader, to know that a reporter working on a story on that topic has the means to get their side of the story, as to why they chose to do so, to be able to provide a fair, balanced report?
If this bill becomes law, that would be impossible. We’d never know that any of the above happened.
PERS is important for other reasons. PERS obligations affect all Oregonians. Higher PERS costs mean less to spend on schools and other services. The contributions paid by cities, counties, school districts and state agencies to cover their employees’ pension and health care benefits more than doubled last July. Collectively, that will gobble an extra $1 billion out of state and local coffers in the next two years, with no new teachers, cops or services to show for it.
Cities and school districts around the state, from Bend and Salem-Keizer to much smaller entities, are citing increasing PERS and other benefit costs as a major factor in their budget cuts. The situation is likely to get worse in 2013, as rates will rise again if the pension fund is still in shortfall. The state is $12.8 billion short in meeting all of the pension benefits owed to the 346,000 other retirees and workers.
Yes, public records can be a little uncomfortable sometimes.But when you work for the public, or you get arrested by public police and taken to a public jail, all paid for by taxpayers, it’s information that needs to be available.
The other bill before state legislators, noted above, is a proposed relaxation of public meetings law.
Current law requires members of a public body, such as a city council, school board or fire protection district board, to only discuss public business in an open, public meeting, when a quorum (enough voting members to make a decision) is present.
What that means is that our school board members would be violating the law if a voing majority of them gathered in the back room of a local restaurant without providing public notice of their meeting ahead of time, as required by law, to discuss, say, the proposed four-day school week.
This bill before legislators would allow “physically written communications, communications by electronic mail or communications using other electronic technology that does not permit real-time communication” (Facebook, Skype). It would also allow members of a governing body to talk with a person connected with a decision they are making.
The natural reaction might be, “so what? Let’s lighten up a bit.”
But there’s a good reason journalists are alarmed by this. Loosening the rules requiring public bodies to hold their deliberations in front of their constituents is just further opening the door for public officials who might be already inclined to bend the rules – and, as any journalist who covers public affairs knows well, the existing rules can be bent very easily and often are, across the nation.
Although this issue may not be quite as problematic as cutting off access to public records, such as PERS information, giving elected or appointed officials any chance to do business out of sight of the public is a very bad idea.
The reason records are public and meetings are public is because both involve the public – citizens’ – business. Just as a boss sometimes needs to be able to determine how effectively employees are doing their jobs, Oregon residents – taxpayers – need to know how their money is being spent and how their business is being conducted.
That’s the real issue here and that’s why these bills are bad news.