What’s in a name?
More than words needed to keep government open
You could have knocked me over with a feather last Tuesday night during the Troy City Council’s General Services Committee meeting. The main topic of the meeting was to be the condition of the cityowned Frear Park Golf Course, and on that topic, there was good news. Thanks to some miracle worker the city had brought in, the five greens that had all been burned out because of a bad checmical sprayer that caused them to be overfertilized were on the road to recovery. In fact, four of them are even good enough to be played on, while a temporary green is expected to be needed on the 17th hole for the rest of the season.
The subject — and tone — of the meeting changed sharply, though, when committee members asked city Parks and Recreation Commissioner George Rogers to identify the mystical greens whisperer. Rogers declined, saying the man didn’t want officials at the course where he currently works full- time as its superintendent to know he was spending his nights helping in Troy, or that if the city administration can free up the money in a crippingly tight budget to hire him as its full- time course superintendent. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to understand the law enough to know you just can’t do that … legally.
I was about ready to jump out ofmy skin as I sat in my usual front- row seat on City Floor, but Councilwoman Kim Ashe- McPherson beat me to the punch and then brought me right into the middle of it.
“Well, Mark, how would you feel about that?” she asked, and I didn’t hold back with my response.
“I would be filing a Freedom of Information Law request tomorrow morning,” I said, with not only the council and Rogers in the room, but also Mayor Patrick Madden and Deputy Mayor Monica Kryzjewski.
What followed that answer may have been the most ridiculous moment I have spent in three decades minus two months of reporting on governments big and small.
“And how would the city respond?” Ashe- McPherson then directed towards the gallery.
Before the mayor and deputymayor had a chance to formulate a more politically correct response, Rogers had a Joe Biden moment and spoke what I have no doubt has been the truth in Troy for much longer than his decades on the city payroll.
“We’d just ignore it like we always do,” he cracked.
At first I thought it had to be a joke, but if it was, Rogers has a poker face that would put Shaun Deeb to shame.
Oh no, there’s still more to this tale. As the discussion continued, the committeemembers at themeeting — Republicans Dean Bodnar, Jim Gulli, Mark McGrath and Ashe- McPherson
and Democrat Erin Sullivan-Teta — were asked directly if they had a problem with withholding the name. Gulli, Bodnar and McGrath each said they had none, while the other committee members remained silent. I waited patiently until meeting’s end and then did something I have done maybe a handful of times inmy entire career: I called them out on what they said.
By that time, the committee had been joined by Republican council President Carmella Mantello, who was unaware of what had transpired until I asked the group en masse if they really felt the way they had expressed in a public meeting — though I’m not even sure there was a “civilian” in attendance. As members of a council majority that had run on a shared platform topped by an expression, “openness and transparency,” they have used as a billy club against the
Democratic administration from Day 1, I asked, are you really saying it’s OK to break the law to keep a city employee’s name secret?
After listening to them all hem and haw — and apologizing to As heMcPherson for initially implying she was among those who had given her explicit approval — it was then the administration’s turn, though Mantello later said she absolutely agreed with my position. On the administration’s behalf, the deputy mayor approached me with the offer of first dibs on theman’s name, but only when he’s willing to make it public, and on the condition that I don’t report on the identity question.
Anybody who saw the front page of Thursday’s paper can tell you how I responded.
Look, I totally understand that this man’s name is not a big deal in the grand scheme of life, and I also get why he may not want his current employer to know ( I once went on a weeklong tryout at a newspaper 30 miles from my employer, and they never found out).
As I said during the subsequent post- meeting conversation, I would have no issue with a privately owned golf course choosing not to disclose his name, but this is a course paid for by and responsible to the taxpayer — which is the point of socalled sunshine laws that severely restrict government’s right to withhold public information.
Having a government job is not the same as working for a private company, and to expect any differently is simply foolish. Ask the millions of state and local employees whose annual salaries can easily be found on the Internet ( including mine for the six months I worked as a 9- 1- 1 dispatcher). In most cases — though not as many as in the past — it’s a moresecure job with better pay and benefits than is available in the private sector, and this loss of privacy is a fair tradeoff to me.
I’m sure this guy isn’t some wanted criminal or a scam artist on the take, as I said to the entire assembled group, but that’s not my judgment to make, and
it certainly isn’t theirs, either. It may be no big deal in this case, but where does that lead? The law was put in place to set definitive parameters, and if you’re willing to step an inch over the line this time, what’s to stop you from stepping further and further, as long as you can keep getting away with it.
It’s a strict matter of principle that traditional journalists were trained to defend. Sometimes it costs us sources, sometimes even friends and fellow employees. We — the media in the collective sense — are supposed to be doing stories like this, not breathlessly following the latest lamebrained Tweet from the president.
In joking earlier that night with some of the officials, I used one of my favorite lines about the business: “You know you’re being fair as a journalist if both sides hate you.” Maybe a bit extreme, but it serves to prove what true journalism is and it still needs to play an important role in a society that has become so politicized.
We in the media are not — or, at least, should not be — “owned” by either side, or any side. The only thing I am beholden to is you, the person who simply doesn’t have the time to do the digging we’re paid to do to make sure your hardearned money is being put to use for the benefit of you and your neighbors, and not people like the string of politicians we’ve seen paraded off to prison on the other side of the river.
By the way, I did file that FOIL request the next day. As of late Monday afternoon, I had yet to receive a response.