Salaries should not be secret

Without citing any reasons, members of the Legislative Commission voted unanimously in Carson City Thursday to free cities and counties from having to post on their web sites the salaries and benefits of individual employees.

The vote came after John Sherman, Washoe County finance director, said “There is a cost” to posting the salaries of individual workers – though he didn’t cite what that cost actually is.

“Cost” is an absurd argument, here. The real “cost” of posting salaries and benefits, from the point of view of the bureaucrats, is that the peasants are thus made aware of the kind of unaffordable, unsustainable largesse our elected officials have been doling out to our supposed “public servants.” (In 1996, Bob Gagnier, executive director of the State of Nevada Employees Association, actually went to the capital and told legislators his members now object to being called “public servants.” He said they prefer to be called “officers.”)

The taxpayers squawk at being made to pay out twice as much in salary and benefits as the price for which they themselves would often be willing to do these same jobs. This is bad news for public employee union chiefs, whose pillow talk to their politician bedmates then presumably starts to revolve about how to get this information back under wraps.

The move brought justifiable criticism from the Nevada Press Association and the Nevada Policy Research Institute, the conservative think tank based in Las Vegas.

The regulation in question would put into effect a law passed in 2011 that exempts cities and counties from having to publish in newspapers a quarterly list showing all bills they’ve paid. Now it would suffice for them to post such lists on the web.

Nevada Press Association Executive Director Barry Smith warned that under the new regulations, information about public workers’ salaries may remain public record, but people interested in that data could fine themselves forced to “walk down to city hall” to get it.

The new bill – Senate Bill 65 – was not written to allow cities and counties to delete individual salary information from their web sites, Mr. Smith pointed out. But the 12-member Legislative Commission has now put that into the regulation, by allowing counties and cities to aggregate on their web sites how much money departments are paying in salaries.

Yet the individual salaries “are a big part of what people want to see,” Mr. Smith notes.

Victor Joecks, a spokesman for NPRI, said his organization lists annual salary information for public employees on its transparentnevada.com site, and plans to continue doing so.

That’s admirable. But who’s to say this private operation will always be here to do that?

While many officials talk about how they want transparency in government, “When no one is looking, they try to get away with as much as they can,” Mr. Joecks notes.

When firemen and other municipal employees can make $100,000 per year – and retire in their 40s and immediately start collecting lifetime pensions of more than $80,000 – you don’t need a degree in accounting to know that the tax burden on a $40,000 working Joe or Jane is just going to keep going up.

The individual salaries are public information. The 2013 Legislature should promptly order them both published in the newspapers, and posted online.