Columbus Dispatch on OEA lawsuit: The wrong direction, 'one more in a series of steps down the road toward a secret and unaccountable government'
Step by step, the public's right to know is being curtailed
If neither courts nor the keepers of public records will stand up for the public's right to see those records, then lawmakers must step in.
When the Ohio Education Association, the state's largest teachers union, sued to block an attempt by the Ohio Republican Party to get a list of teachers' names, addresses and other contact information from the State Board of Education, the state initially fought the lawsuit, arguing correctly that nothing in state law shields this information from public view.
Now that Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Daniel T. Hogan has ruled in favor of the teachers union, granting an injunction forbidding the education department from releasing the records, the department has decided to let the ruling stand unchallenged.
That's one more in a series of steps down the road toward a secret and unaccountable government.
Hogan's decision rests on an unfortunate 2005 ruling in which the Ohio Supreme Court held that the home addresses of state employees are not a public record. The ruling came after The Dispatch sued the Department of Administrative Services for withholding employees' information.
Separately, lawmakers passed a measure in 2007 forbidding cities to release home addresses of police officers, prosecutors, prison guards and others in law enforcement.
In the most recent case, involving teachers' addresses, Hogan wrote, "There is no good reason for treating the personal contact information of these two different, but overlapping, groups of people differently."
If that's true, it's all the more reason for lawmakers to revisit and reaffirm the principle of open government: People have a right to know who is working for their tax dollars, how much they're paid and where they live.
Police officers and other law-enforcement employees typically justify their desire for secrecy by claiming that criminals or disgruntled individuals could use a public directory of public-safety workers' addresses to do physical harm to someone. But no one arguing that point ever provides much in the way of examples of that happening.
The harm that could be done by secret government, on the other hand, is clear.
Many public employees are required to live in the political subdivisions they serve; how can the public be sure that they do if their addresses are secret?
In the late 1980s, a Dispatch investigation found that two rental properties owned by Columbus police officers had been the target of narcotics raids. The questions prompted by those stories would have gone unraised and unanswered if the owners' names on those property records had been closed to public scrutiny.
Employees' addresses aren't the only area of public-records retrenchment. The state Supreme Court issued an especially troubling ruling a year ago, when, citing attorney-client privilege, it held that a government agency needn't make public a fact-finding report if the report was prepared by a private lawyer. In the underlying case, the Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority sought an investigation of allegations that the authority's president was having an affair with a lobbyist who worked at the authority, funneling public money to her and using his influence to help her.
The authority board eventually fired the president but kept the fact-finding report secret. With that precedent, public bodies could hide all manner of wrongdoing by using private attorneys to investigate it.
Open records make public employees uncomfortable, but that's part of the price of public employment in an open society.
Good government requires that citizens be able to serve as watchdogs, and that requires open records.
Ohio lawmakers should make sure that state law enshrines those principles more clearly, so that those who would draw the curtain over democracy will have less luck with the courts when they try to do so.
posted by Kathie Bracy at 1:49 PM
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