The furor and finger pointing going on at Claremont City Hall over the salary information we posted on Friday has us scratching our heads here at the Insider. As we noted yesterday, there was no cloak-and-dagger involved. The source of the information was the city's own online document archives.
What happened was that we were working on a post about former Claremont City Manager Glenn Southard's recent raise to $300,000 per year at his current job in Indio. We were wondering how that compared to current Claremont City Manager Jeff Parker's salary, so we went onto the city's document archive and did a search for "Jeff Parker salary" or something along those lines.
What popped up were the scanned-in bi-monthly pay stubs for all city employees going back several years. This information was in PDF form for anyone connected to the Internet to see. Now, you would think that anything posted in such a way, mixed in among all the other city commission and city council minutes and agenda materials, was simply public information. Why else would the city post it?
So, it was odd to read Will Bigham's article Saturday on the whole brouhaha.
According to Saturday's Daily Bulletin:
City officials said Friday that there had been no public-records request or release related to the information on the blog, meaning that either the information was leaked by a staff member, or the city's computer system was hacked by an outside party.But no public information request was needed. It was on the city's website! No hacking, no leaking, just going on and doing a simple search. The city must have known that the source was their own website because Friday - before the Bigham article came out - they removed access to their document archive. The Bigham article quoted Parker:
"However it got into the hands of the blog, there was a theft involved, and that concerns me greatly," Parker said. "I'm going to look into starting an investigation into the potential theft of that information."
Parker told Bigham that he had contacted Police Chief Paul Cooper regarding an investigation into the matter. He might save some time and just have someone check the public records document archives.
We just wonder how much of this the city already realizes. After all, as we have pointed out, they quickly took steps to remove access to the online archive. All of this talk about theft strikes us as a lot of smoke-blowing by an embarrassed city of Claremont trying to cover up its own foolishness. See the Foothills Cities blog for more commentary on the matter.
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