True Source of City Salary Information, or "They Left Their Website Unattended"

Time for the ol' Insider to come clean. We didn't wake up Friday morning in the Claremont City Hall dumpster. Really. Just having a little fun with folks. Doesn't anyone read carefully anymore? What do the words, "Picture", "Imagine", and "Visualize" mean?

We've gotten a lot of inquiries as to where we really got the 2006 City salary information. Fact is--we are not fooling this time--we got it from the City website in the City Documents Archive. It was public information, put on a public website by the City, and available to anyone who took the trouble to look. It seems the City saves a document with page scans of all pay stubs and they even index it.

We'd like to say, with Casey Stengel, "you could look it up." But you can't anymore.

The City has apparently figured out that its own website was the source of the information, and in the usual Claremont spirit of open government has locked out access to the document archive. Here is a screen shot made Friday evening:


In case you have trouble reading it, the text says:

City Documents Archive...DUE TO TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES ACCESS TO CERTAIN CITY DOCUMENT ARCHIVES WILL NOT BE AVAILABLE UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. THE CURRENT COUNCIL MEETING AGENDA MATERIALS ARE STILL AVAILABLE.

We believe there is a very real public purpose served by open disclosure of the compensation paid civil servants. The California Supreme Court agreed in a decision published only last week: “Openness in government is essential to the functioning of democracy,” Chief Justice Ronald George wrote for the Court. “The public has a strong, well- established interest in the amount of salary paid to public employees.”

When you review our "Labor Day" post of Friday, especially as it is augmented, we believe you will find the amounts paid to public employees simply to be huge.

(Please see the Labor Day post below. We are adding to it at the bottom as often as time and requests permit)