Censorship Effort Underway in Maine?

As our friends from  the Maine Heritage Policy Center are reporting on the new blog on MaineOpenGov.org, there is an effort underway in the Democrat-controlled State Senate to

censor the taxpayer-paid salaries of some 90,000 Maine government, school and other public employees, trampling the right of the public to review how their hard-earned tax dollars are spent by local and state officials. 

That information is currently public by law, and has been made available to public scutiny on MaineOpenGov.org, a transparency portal launched by Maine Heritage Policy Center in 2008. Says the Policy Center:

Censoring the names of public employees opens the door for massive taxpayer-paid bonuses, salary hikes and secret deals to occur in the shadows, because this vital information would become inaccessible to citizens and the media.

It looks like the Kennebec Journal agrees with them, as this editorial from this past weekend indicates:

"Open sunshine is all well and good, but ..."

Our First Amendment antenna perks right up when we hear a phrase like that. It sounds like someone doesn't really think very highly of the right to know.

And, as we read the rest of that sentence, our fears were confirmed: " ... putting people's names there is not helpful."

The speaker wasn't just someone off the street -- she's the No. 2 person in the Maine Senate: Assistant Majority Leader Lisa Marraché, a Democrat from Waterville.

She objects to a Web site that lists the salaries of state employees by title and name. She has sponsored a bill to prohibit listing the name. There could be a job title, department -- that sort of thing -- but no name. Marraché and her co-sponsors say listing the name is a violation of the person's privacy.

No one wants the world knowing how much -- or how little -- we make. That's understandable. But when you take a public job, you ought to know that's a possibility. The people who pay your salary might just want to know much they're paying. A job title is just half the information.

The paper suspects some sweetheart deals here:

Marraché says she's had complaints from some state employees about the listing, which appears on the Web site put up by the Maine Heritage Policy Center. And that's likely part of the real problem: The center is conservative and no friend of the Democratic-controlled Legislature nor the state employees' union. And public employee unions and Democrats are long-standing political bedfellows.

The whole thing makes Marraché's bill look like payback.

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