The Price of Public Employment

Governor M. Michael Rounds has finally given in to logic and law and agreed to make public the salaries of the state's nearly 14,000 employees [Kevin Dobbs, "State Agrees to Provide Its Salary Figures," that Sioux Falls newspaper that really ought to stop peddling smut and unmentionables, 2007.07.21]. Rounds's lawyer Neil Fulton has indicated that the state is compiling a list "with all deliberate speed" and will hand the completed product over to the media "shortly."

The article notes that Secretary of State Chris Nelson has already made the salaries of his office's employees public. Secretary Nelson has shown himself to be a very open, straightforward, and non-ax-grinding public official. Guys who count ballots and keep elections honest need to be like that.

Governor Rounds and other state officials could learn something about openness from the Secretary of State. Instead, Rounds, Attorney General Long, and others have been more inclined to delay and obfuscate. Long has said the information is already public; however, his report on the matter "doesn't attempt to characterize how easy [sic] that can be done." (I am reminded of the Vogons posting Earth's demolition orders at the local planning department on Alpha Centauri -- hmm, does AG Long write poetry?) Dobbs tells us "Jason Dilges, commissioner of the Bureau of Finance and Management, has called [assembling the state salary data] a 'Herculean task' that was not reasonable to request of state agencies." (What, no master spreadsheet? Four keystrokes: hit Ctrl-A and Ctrl-P? I'll add that to my list of doctoral research projects.)

Corey Landeen of the SD State Employees Organization continues to fret over the release of this salary information:

"It's a bad situation for a lot of people.... It puts people in an uncomfortable position of having their pay being an issue within their communities, and that's been our concern." [Dobbs]

As stated on these pages previously, such is the price of working for the taxpayers. In every other business, the boss knows (or should know) how much of her money each employee is taking home. For public employees, the boss is the public -- us. Public employees (like yours truly) and citizens in general need to remember that, in our blessed democracy, the state is not some separate entity towering over us, with a separate identity, agenda, and secrets. L'état, c'est nous! A state employee's business is everybody's business.

If you choose to work for the state, you must accept that public scrutiny is part of the job. My experience as a public school teacher showed me that public knowledge of my salary was nothing compared to the public scrutiny of my every word and action in carrying out my daily duties. Carry out your duties in accordance with law and conscience (as I always have, and as the vast, dedicated majority of our public employees do), and the fact that everyone knows you're getting $30,900 a year won't matter.