City Says, "Death to the Insider!"

Death Penalty

We've been working on a post trying to tie some of the events of the past month together, in particular the attempt by the city of Claremont to shut down our blog, as well some of the other acts of official secrecy that really seem to fly in the face of the openness Claremont officials give occasional lip service to.

Well, the Daily Bulletin editorial board beat us to the punch. They have an editorial in today's Bulletin that neatly ties a lot of these observations together in a far more clear and concise way than we ever could.

The Bulletin picked up on one particularly disturbing comment a city official made last week:

Mayor Peter Yao said the demand to remove the offending posts and the demand to terminate the blog were "one and the same," but that's not the case at all.

Mayor Yao seems to have absolutely no understanding of the concept of prior restraint. It's one thing to ask Google to remove a post the city finds objectionable - even that is a questionable action - but it's quite another to try to bar all future publication by arguing that the alleged offender (the Insider) might do some other as-yet unknown, objectionable thing in the unspecified future.

The thing has to be published first, then objected to. Claremont, Mayor Yao, and City Attorney Sonia Carvalho have no power to prevent publication beforehand, which is what the city was trying to do. It amounts to a banana republic shutting down the printing presses.

Further, as we've argued, and as the Bulletin points out, the city's claim that the pay stubs we published contained confidential information is very doubtful:

Besides, it's not at all clear that the offending posts were illegal, or obtained illegally, or even consisted of privileged information. The California Supreme Court ruled in August that pay records for public employees are a matter of public record.

The pay stubs that were posted itemized dollar amounts for earnings, benefits, leave earnings and deductions. It did not reveal private information such as Social Security number, date of birth, home address or bank account numbers. The post did include information about types of medical deductions that we would not reveal; Carvalho says that information is privileged, some open-governments say it's not, some are unsure.

This all points up the greater need for original source documents. The city would rather provide lists of names and salary numbers instead of the actual pay stubs. But the city clearly cannot be trusted to just give out sanitized spreadsheets. If confidential information is on the pay stubs as they claim, that can be redacted, but the public should be able to see the type of information being withheld.

Clearly, Claremont has sought to hide the amounts of money it pays to its employees and to conceal certain things like performance bonuses. Why? Because that information might reveal that public employees are much more highly compensated than the majority of workers in the private sector. And that would raise the question of whether or not the public is really getting its money's worth for some of these positions.

They're just mad at themselves for posting the material on their on-line document archive where we, and anybody else interested, could easily read and download the pay stubs.


Secrecy

Another thing that this sad episode reminds us of is Claremont's history of conducting its official business in secret. Claremont, after all, was awarded a Black Hole Award in 2000 by the California First Amendment Coalition (CFAC), and the city seems to have learned nothing in the intervening years.

Today's Bulletin editorial states:

The cases are stronger, in our opinion, that Claremont's council violated the Brown Act:

In June, went it met in closed session to discuss negotiations between two private parties concerning the city's DoubleTree Hotel.

In January 2005, when it met in closed session to discuss a councilwoman's actions and how to respond to them.

Twice in early 2003, when a councilwoman participated in a committee meeting of a council subcommittee consisting of two councilmen, turning it into an unagendized council meeting; and when a councilman contacted his colleagues one by one to ask for another term as mayor, constituting an unlawful serial council meeting.

The hypocrisy of it all is that some of the our current councilmembers - Ellen Taylor, Linda Elderkin, and Sam Pedroza - and the organizations that back these people (the Claremont Area League of Women Voters, the local Democratic Club, and others) would surely argue against governmental secrecy on the national level but tolerate, support, and encourage it on the local level.

Sadder still is to watch these groups abandon all they claim to stand for, time and again, merely for the sake of keeping control of the city.

It's easy to speak out against something 3,000 miles away, something you have little chance of influencing. The real test is when it's in your own backyard. Will you stand up, even if it means criticizing your friends and neighbors, or will you deny all those things you thought you believed in: free speech, open government, rule of law, fundamental fairness?

In Claremont, we know the answer: Res ipsa loquitur.