| Appointees' information is private? |
By: By Jaci Smith, Managing Editor
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Posted: Tuesday, August 12, 2008 11:42 am
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UPDATE Wednesday, 3:39 p.m.
Scott Oney supplied the News his unredacted letter of application. Thanks, Scott!
UPDATE 12:56 p.m.
Candidate Victor Summa supplied the News his unredacted application. Thanks, Victor!
We discovered an (another!) alarming little loophole in the state's open records law this week when we requested the letters sent in by the applicants for Noah Cashman's open council seat.
Turns out that if an individual is an applicant to an appointed seat in local government, much less information is made public about them, according to an amendment to the state open records law, made this year.
So, when we asked for letters that each councilor-applicant sent in, we got a heavily redacted form. We were not entitled to see whether the candidate met the criteria for service, any other qualifications they think are relevant for office, how to reach the candidate and most importantly, whether they intend to honor the council's request that they not run for Cashman's seat in the fall election.
The ultimate irony of this, of course, is that most of this information came out at the interviews on Monday night before the regular council session, making all the time city officials spent redacting our documents useless.
But the most interesting piece, whether they promise not to run, remains unknown to the general public.
That's wrong.
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I am not sure you were told the correct thing. The legislative change was the following:
Sec. 10. Minnesota Statutes 2006, section 13.601, subdivision 3, is amended to read:
Subd. 3. Applicants for appointment. (a) Data about applicants for appointment to a public body collected by a government entity as a result of the applicant's application for appointment to the public body are private data on individuals except that the following are public:
(1) name;
(2) city of residence except when the appointment has a residency requirement that requires the entire address to be public;
(3) education and training;
(4) employment history;
(5) volunteer work;
(6) awards and honors;
(7) prior government service; and
(8) any data required to be provided or that is voluntarily provided in an application for appointment to a multimember agency pursuant to section 15.0597.
(b) Once an individual is appointed to a public body, the following additional items of data are public:
(1) residential address; and
(2) either a telephone number or electronic mail address where the appointee can be reached, or both at the request of the appointee.
(c) Notwithstanding paragraph (b), any electronic mail address or telephone number
provided by a public body for use by an appointee shall be public. An appointee may
use an electronic mail address or telephone number provided by the public body as the
designated electronic mail address or telephone number at which the appointee can be reached.
I have taken out the striken language from Chapter 315 so as you can see the only thing that should be redacted is the private information in clause (b) which is very limited information and most often information that can be obtained from other public sources.
I would argue that the letters submitted except for the information listed in clause (b) is public information and should be made available to you upon request.
See: https://www.revisor.leg.state.mn.us/laws/?id=315&doctype=Chapter&year=2008&type=0 SEE SECTION 10
Dapa, that is indeed what the city shared with us as the reason they COULD NOT give us most of the information in the letters. They did leave the name, city and prior government experience. What they took out was all the reasons why these individuals thought they'd be good councilors.
-Jaci
Yeah, this was really a screw up in the drafting of this part of the legislation. Was really meant for citizen adviosry boards. There was so much disagreement on everything that they just stripped out the elected officials that use to be a part of this statute and said that makes everything about them public - now with this noted exception and also the exception if those that are elected are classified as employees are also treated differently. I talked to someone vry familiar with those meetings and discussions and was told that newspapers were ok with the changes but I am not sure that is the case. The legislation should have stated that all information is public information unless specifically classified as private and we would not have this type of information being secretive that is used to select appointed individuals. Another example of poor legislation hammered out because they felt something had to be done even though in the end the result is worse than what it was before.