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State Representative Joe Mullery
100 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
651-296-4262
For more information contact: Ted Modrich 651-296-5809
Column/LTE
PUBLIC EMPLOYEES ARE NOT SECOND-CLASS CITIZENS
The following was a letter I sent to the Star Tribune in response to an editorial they wrote wanting public employees to have to disclose personal information.
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Your editorial, "Tubby Smith Act fits troubling trend" (May 2, 2009) entirely misses the point of the dispute in the Legislature over an amendment to my Omnibus Data Practices Bill (HF 1083).
Is it necessary that the public know how much a school janitor earns at her part-time job at McDonalds? Do we need to know what a volunteer youth basketball coach earns as a clerk at Target? Apparently, the authors of your editorial think so. The provision they support would change the law so radically that all public employees, volunteers for government programs, and any person who does any work for a government agency (for instance, a contractor for a $10 doorknob replacement) would have to disclose, if that government agency collects it, all income they receive no matter how unrelated the income is to their government service. I strongly disagree with this notion; public employees and volunteers are not second-class citizens.
The amendment that you praise assumes that government seeks to hide information about its employees’ conflicts of interest. While conflicts of interest are serious matters, the amendment did not deal with that issue at all. Rather, it required that all remuneration of public employees by both public and private entities be disclosed. Minnesota already has very strong laws regarding public employees’ conflicts of interest, and this law would actually inhibit public disclosure of conflicts in that it would discourage government entities from collecting outside employment data. If the real purpose of the provision is to prevent conflicts of interest, then we should design laws specifically to get at any such problems. This is an overbroad solution to a problem that no one has even alleged to exist.
What is really strange is that the citizen activist and the legislator pushing for this extreme change in the law are the same ones who are leading the effort to hide criminal records from the public. Should society worry more about public employees or convicted criminals?
More importantly, this amendment came out of the blue without the benefit of a bill being introduced or a public hearing that would have allowed the Legislature and the public to fully understand the complexity of this matter. Instead, an amendment was offered at the end of a four and a half-hour hearing on a routine Data Practices bill. It’s ironic that a provision supposedly offered in the interests of protecting citizens against big government oppression was in play because it circumvented laws designed to give the public notice.
Joe Mullery
State Representative, District 58A
North Minneapolis
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