City Fights Blogger On Display of Public Information

rokkaku writes "When the gadfly blogger Claremont Insider went searching for information about employee compensation on the city of Claremont web site, they never expected to find scans of pay stubs for all the employees. Nor did they expect the city attorney to demand that they remove copies of those pay stubs from their web site. They found it especially odd since, according to California law, the compensation of public employees is public information."

Comments

compensation != paystubs

[Surt]

The compensation is public. Pay stubs are not compensation. Pay stubs contain fun stuff that may lead to the compromise of the financial security of the individual. Requesting the takedown of the pay stubs was more than reasonable.

Re:They're just ignorant.

[winkydink]

Actually, the California ruling came about as the result of the Contra Costa Times suing the City of Oakland.

http://www.mercurynews.com/politics/ci_6732431

Don't Give In

[Nom du Keyboard]

Don't give in just because the city attorney says he wants it all back. He is not the law. Only a court can decide what's legal and what isn't. Taking legal advice from a city attorney, or the policeman who just arrested you, is some of the worst advice you will get.

Re:Pay stub != compensation

[DavidShor]

Nice straw man, did you bother to actually look at what he scanned? There was no information about any of the things you mentioned(Except marital status, you could tell whether a girl was married by the Ms or Mrs.). All it had was a dollar amount of benefits given, Salary, and name.

See http://claremontca.blogspot.com/2007/09/labor-day_07.html

Re:Public Information

[Claremont Buzz]

You presume a number of incorrect things. First, there was no "snooping around" involved. The information was posted on a public, online City of Claremont archive designed to reduce the need for the public to make written requests for city documents. The site had been up for several years. We accessed the information while researching an essay on public employee compensation. We simply typed a search for the Claremont City Manager, Jeff Parker, together with the word "performance." We were looking for his latest performance evaluation, which was discussed in public at a city council meeting earlier this year. Up popped a .pdf with pay stubs for all city employees.

Second, there was no personal information for ID thieves to use on any of the paystubs. No Social Security numbers, no dates of birth, no personal phone numbers or home addresses. Only the employee's name and payroll information. All of this information is public information in California - other states may have different laws, but this is the state of affairs in California.

The Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, a local newspaper that has been covering the story, has a copy of the same .pdf file the blog used. The paper published an article on this topic today:

http://www.dailybulletin.com/news/ci_6888125

Re:Except...

[Claremont Buzz]

Well, you are right that there is more to the story than the subject line. However, you are incorrect in assuming that we at the blog aggregated the information. That was the form it was in on the city website - 283 paystub images bundled together in 1 .pdf file.

Also, we did not post every one of the 283 images. We posted two, one for the Claremont City Manager, and one for the director of Human Services.

Additionally, the laws governing these matters are particular to each state. Wisconsin is not California. Like it or not, in California, as a result of an 8/27/07 California Supreme Court decision, the information on the paystubs is public. That's why we did not think anything of it when we saw the images. We simply thought Claremont was providing that information on their website as they did with everything else - agendas, minutes, and city staff reports going back fifty years.

A local newspaper, the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, has been covering the issue and submitted the matter to several California public records experts, none of whom found anything exceptional in the images, other than the bank routing numbers, which were not discernable in our images. Here is a link to the Bulletin article:

http://www.dailybulletin.com/news/ci_6888125

Re:Except...

[jthill]

"public information" != "information that must necessarily be accessible instantly, on-demand

Sure: the government isn't obligated to go to any great length to make it convenient for the public to get public data, and they can even charge for what efforts they do make.

So?

That's not even remotely similar to the government forbidding a member of the public from exposing public information which he regards as scandalous to public scrutiny, which is what happened here.

Would you want anyone to see images of your entire pay stubs[...]?

Even the most slack-witted scan, which I just performed with about ten seconds' effort, reveals this:

The city did not contact this blog, nor have we been told what information in the documents is confidential - there were no Social Security numbers, no dates of birth, no personal identifiers. The documents only contained name and pay information

Re:Pay stub != compensation

[Dun Malg]

The posting I read (before posting) said:

Until all this can be sorted out, we're posting the text of our Labor Day post minus the images in question. We maintain the city claims of confidentiality for the information posted on their website are baseless.

It does not mention if the text posted is the entirety of what was readable in the scans prior to their removal. Nice attempt at weaseling, but if you RTFA it mentions what information they contained:

"there were no Social Security numbers, no dates of birth, no personal identifiers. The documents only contained name and pay information"