Watching out for your interests requires access to public records

When Washington voters overwhelmingly passed a public-records initiative in 1972, the message was resounding — keep government open.

With the exception of 10 specific exemptions, government records were to be open to the people. Today there are more than 300 exemptions and constant pressure to add more. On Tuesday a 13-member "Sunshine Committee" will hold its first meeting in a process to evaluate those exemptions with an eye toward restoring greater openness. But even as the committee convenes, the fight to keep government open goes on in the trenches.

The Seattle Times last week was hit with criticism, and even some talk of a circulation boycott, from employees of King County government. What set them off was an e-mail from County Executive Ron Sims regarding a Times request for an updated list of all King County employees, as well as their department, job title, hire date, salary and birth date. The Times first obtained this data from the county in 1998.

All of that is public information. What isn't public are the employees' addresses and Social Security numbers, and The Times did not request that information.

Sims told the employees he was reluctant to include the full birth dates, but legally obligated to do so. He said the information would be transmitted to the newspaper Monday.

"While I support and stand by the concepts of open government, as well as the principles of the Public Records Act, I sincerely do regret this outcome. I do want to assure you that we will continue to work diligently to protect your privacy to the extent possible under the law," his message concluded.

Most of the employee complaints to The Times were civil, and many expressed strong support for transparency in government. But, the employees said they didn't understand why The Times would need their dates of birth and they worry about identity theft.

On Friday, Local 587 of the Amalgamated Transit Union, which represents about 3,800 King County employees, filed a lawsuit to block release of the employee birth dates. That suit will likely go the way of a similar action the city of Seattle brought against KIRO-TV last year. The court ruled birth dates of public employees are public information.

Given that ruling, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels tried to have the Legislature make birth dates exempt from disclosure. That effort failed in the last legislative session.

Nickels had sought the support of Attorney General Rob McKenna, who is a bulldog on the issue of identity theft. But the attorney general declined, citing three main reasons:

• The birth dates are widely available on the Internet and elsewhere, including state voter records.

• The dates of birth are "an important tool to help keep government accountable."

• There are better ways to fight identity theft.

On that last point, McKenna cited a 2006 Better Business Bureau study that analyzed how identity thieves obtain information. "Information from public records was not identified as a source of identity theft," he wrote in a letter to Nickels.

"Instead, the study found that most identity thieves obtain personal information from a stolen wallet or purse, or that the identity thief is the victim's friend or family member. ... Publicly available dates of birth have not been cited at all as a source of identity theft," McKenna wrote.

The Times is sensitive to public employees' apprehension, but their concerns must be weighed against the right of citizens to hold government accountable. Having information like birth dates has enabled The Times to report important stories, and the newspaper's record of using this kind of personnel data responsibly is unassailable.

Our purpose in routinely obtaining this data is not so that we can publish personal information about individual employees. We gather a variety of public databases from many different sources, including state and city employees, voter registration records, medical licenses and property records. We maintain these resources on internal computers, used exclusively by reporters and editors for news gathering.

Such databases help us accurately and quickly identify people we need to contact. Birth dates are important when dealing with common names or incomplete information.

Having the dates of birth of public-school coaches in Washington was a vital part of our "Coaches Who Prey" investigative series. Despite findings of sexual misconduct, coaches were able to get coaching and teaching jobs at other public schools or with private clubs. "Most importantly, the dates of birth helped the Times track coaches who had moved from one district to another," said reporter Christine Willmsen.

Another example: the disputed gubernatorial election of 2004. A group of Times reporters spent several months analyzing the voting problems during the election. We used the names and dates of birth of registered voters to compare with the names and dates of birth of felons. We also matched records by comparing signatures from court documents to voter signatures.

"Without the date of birth, the Times would have been unable to report several stories pointing out flaws in the appeals of the election outcome, and in the election process itself," said Cheryl Phillips, an editor who oversaw the data analysis.

Times investigations editor James Neff said stripping dates of birth from public records would "absolutely cripple our efforts to watchdog government for the public." Over the years he has seen important stories about government misconduct that would have been nearly impossible to do without knowing public employees' dates of birth. Stories such as the ones about:

• Felon employees working in sensitive public jobs, including sex offenders driving school buses or working as counselors, social workers or in classrooms; and individuals with multiple citations for drunken driving who operated buses, patrol cars, cranes, etc.

• Double dipping: one person getting paid for two full-time public-employee jobs or a public employee retiring with full benefits, then getting rehired, in effect being paid twice for one job.

• Ghost employees: Paychecks continue to be cut and cashed for a person who has died, quit or is a no-show.

• Pension scamming: claiming to be a few years older in order to retire earlier at full benefits.

"Reporting about these abuses keeps the public safe, protects the public purse, and keeps government workers honest," Neff said.

And let it be said that, on the whole, people in government are honest and hard-working. But the spirit of the state's open-government law was clearly set out in its statement of legislative intent:

"The people of this state do not yield their sovereignty to the agencies that serve them. The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know."

Inside The Times appears in the Sunday Seattle Times. If you have a comment on news coverage, write to Michael R. Fancher, P.O. Box 70, Seattle, WA 98111, call 206-464-3310 or send e-mail to mfancher@seattletimes.com. More columns at www.seattletimes.com/columnists