It's your government, not the employees'

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Updated: February 7, 2011 1:54PM

What does the government have to hide? That's the question every person should ask when elected officials try to keep secrets.

A new Illinois Freedom of Information Act went into effect Jan. 1, providing residents with new tools to access public documents.

The law hardly had taken effect, however, before special interest groups and legislators started picking away at it.

Teachers, principals and school superintendents were made exempt from provisions that could have made their performance evaluations available to the public.

The educators threatened to scuttle a bill that would have made Illinois eligible for Race to the Top funds - millions in federal money available through the stimulus bill to improve schools. Rather than risk losing money that would have helped children, lawmakers said they caved in to the education special interests.

But the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the largest union representing government workers, immediately said it would try to get the same exemption for its members.

The Legislature now is poised to exempt every government employee in this state from the Freedom of Information Act.

House Bill 5154 passed March 11 and now is before the Illinois Senate. Here's what it says: "Disclosure of performance evaluations under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act shall be prohibited."

I would like to point out that the law does not guarantee that a performance evaluation be made public.

However, under the law, if a government body or agency decides it is going to deny access to public records, it first must submit that denial to the Illinois attorney general's office for review by a public access counselor.

The public access counselor could find that the record is not a public document or, in the case of a performance evaluation, suggest that the information be made public with certain details redacted. For example, a Social Security number or medical information could be blacked out before the document is made public.

If the government agency still believed it was wrong to release the information, it could go to court to try to prevent its release.

But your government officials don't want to mess with any of that stuff. They were fine with the old law, which basically made you, the private citizen, go to court against them to get the information you were entitled to.

The revised law gives the citizen seeking information the benefit of the doubt in a court of law.

It seems to me that taxpayers have the right to know if a police officer has been accused of brutality 25 times or has been repeatedly cited for poor performance by his superiors.

Police officers would say that such accusations could be unjustified.

I wonder what a police officer would say if his daughter were killed while attending a party at a building where a porch collapsed. What if that porch had been approved by a building inspector repeatedly cited for negligence or sleeping on the job?

What if his supervisor had recommended that the inspector be fired, but a relative higher up in the government refused to take action?

These sorts of documents routinely become public information after lawsuits are filed.

But wouldn't it be nice if such tragedies could be prevented by giving the public information before the accident took place?

The old freedom of information law was shot through with loopholes and exemptions for special interest groups. That's one of the reasons a new law was needed.

Now it, too, is under attack.

This is your law. This is your information.

You're the people who pay the bills. These are your employees. And these are your elected officials.

Yet, it seems, public officials and employees seem to think that once they accept a government paycheck, what they do with "their time" and "their money" is none of our business. It is their government, not ours.

If you believe in government accountability and transparency, you are going to have to fight for it. Because the opponents of open government always are going to try to enhance secrecy. Call your state senator and ask him to vote against HB 5154.

It's interesting how every time government officials do something good, they send out a news release and a photograph of their smiling faces (at taxpayer expense, of course). When things go bad, they don't want anyone to know about it.

I don't need to know every little detail about every government employee in the state.

But when someone tells me I'm not entitled to know anything about the way our public employees are performing, I grow suspicious.

What are you trying to hide?