Dose of sunshine for Germantown administration

The effort by Germantown residents Jon Thompson and Sarah Wilkerson-Freeman to bring more transparency to the suburb’s administrative workings reinforces the importance of citizen watchdogs.

The pair have shown that citizens seeking more government transparency can be just as effective as the news media.

The dogged pursuit by Thompson and WilkersonFreeman to have their open-records requests honored resulted in more clarity about longtime City Administrator Patrick Lawton’s salary, which has increased nearly 80 percent since 2001, when he was paid $120,000. In that time, he has received six raises, including an 18.5 percent bump in early 2007 that raised his annual salary $23,400 to $150,000. The city administrator in Germantown today makes $215,250 after 27 years in the job.

The released documents also revealed Germantown city employees have a perk almost no one else in the workplace gets. They can sell up to 200 hours of unused vacation back a year, plus carry forward any leftover time.

And the documents showed that Germantown taxpayers have paid more than $1.5 million on premiums for generous life insurance policies purchased over the past 15 years for a handful of aldermen and top administrators.

Lawton has done a good job of steering Germantown on a course that keeps it one of the nation’s premier suburbs. It is not up to us to make a judgment about his pay. That is for the aldermen and residents, but that determination should be made in an atmosphere of transparency. The same thought applies to the vacation buyback perk.

The life insurance policies bought for a handful of aldermen and top administrators are more worrisome. We have to wonder whether citizens would have supported them if they had known about the practice.

Apparently aware of the building criticism about the policies, former mayor Sharon Goldsworthy recently notified the city that she wanted her policy canceled. Her policy was worth $200,000. In 15 years, taxpayers paid more than $55,000 in premiums on her AXA Advisors policy. She did not pay a cent. The policy would have paid her survivors $150,000.

Lawton and Mayor Mike Palazzolo surrendered their policies last year.

Citizens who persistently pursue open-records requests are sometimes considered nuisances, and it is not unusual for them to face exorbitant fees to have documents copied or to run into stalling tactics to delay the release of records.

We are not accusing Germantown officials of doing such things, although Thompson said he was hit with high fees for his records requests.

Officials in larger cities are used to the kind of citizen scrutiny displayed by Thompson and WilkersonFreeman. We have seen over the years that officials in smaller cities resent or are not prepared to comply with open-records quests.

Such requests can overwhelm larger cities. For instance, former Memphis mayor A C Wharton commissioned an independent review of how his administration handled the requests and mandated changes to, among other things, speed up the process.

Transparency in government is imperative. Taxpayers have a right to know exactly how things work in their governments.

Jon Thompson, Sarah Wilkerson-Freeman and others like them deserve kudos for helping to make that possible.