GilfordGrok

No secret - I am in favor of printing the employee salaries in the Town Annual Report for both the Town and SAU employees.  My feeling is that since taxpayers are paying the freight, they are entitled to see the manifest.

The argument has been - hey, why make it easy for taxpayers?  They can come in and do a Right To Know anytime they want to get the information.

This proves the argument:

Blandford questioned the need to publicize the information at all, since the public has access to it through making a formal Right-to-Know request for the information.

As it stands now the district keeps track of who makes Right-to-Know requests in town and what information they are seeking.

Blandford said that should the information be printed in the town's annual report, the district would lose their monitoring "control."

I have, in the past, requested employee data from both the Town and the SAU under Right To Know requests and posted it on GilfordGrok.  I have already done the request for both the Town and the SAU for this year and will most likely post it again. 

For someone like me, this is not a big deal.  I care not a whit who thinks what when I do so and use that data.  People may like it, or they may not.  I believe that I am doing the right thing by taxpayers when I do so.

The above statement by Mr. Blandford is very chilling, in my opinion.  It is one thing to accept an RTK request and then file it....I have no problem with that.  What his statements say, however, is that "we are watching you".  Face it, this kills most folks willingness to stick their necks out.  For those of us who have made the decision to make local politics what we do, well, it comes with the territory (and even then, there are those that do not wish the limelight).  For a regular Joe Sixpack, this is a move that could be fraught with terror.  Like the idea or not, many of not most parents will not put their kids in danger of retribution. 

The Budget Committee, in a letter to both the School Board and Board of Selectmen, said was that it was important for the voters to have the information when deciding issue of the budget. This rational particularly applies when voting teacher contracts up or down.

Thus, why NOT make it easier for taxpayers to make decisions that affect their wallets?

"The reality is that the (the School Board and Budget Committee) that are making the decisions have the information, so the people that need to know, know," said Weeks.

With all due respect, Ms. Weeks is wrong.  True, it is up to the School Board to conduct their contract agreements (directly or through proxies), thus, they need the information.  The BudComm needs the information so that we can, to the best of our ability, make a recommendation to the voters - THE legislative body in Gilford.

However, it is the VOTERS / TAXPAYERS  that actually make the decision.  It is they that will vote to accept the teachers contract (and the police contract).  Thus they NEED this information to vote correctly, not according to my notions, not to the notions of the School Board or to the employees, but to the  needs and notions of the taxpayers.  And that is all that counts.

The legality of publishing such information was questioned, however teacher salaries, the names associated, and a dollar amount attributed to the benefits being given are public information subject to the New Hampshire's Right-to-Know law.

During the debates of the BudComms, I have heard the conflation of public vs private employees data.  For those who earn (and they do earn it) their pay from the taxpayers, it is public.  The argument has been made that since the private sector does not, neither should we print the public data (trying to make the two sectors equivalent).  They are not, nor should they be.

Simply put - if you do not wish your data to be publicly available, go work in the private sector.  One works where they do by choice - it is not by entitlement or by someone forcing it upon you.

The board directed Superintendent Paul DeMinico to send along the information the teachers union, discuss it with district leadership staff, and consult the Board of Selectmen on how they will proceed in printing the town employee side of things.

On another note, I wonder at the rhetoric passed by the School Board that we, the Budget Committee, should have butted out of their business last year during the football and health insurance kerfuffles.  They said that they were elected to make the decisions - we should not stray into their policies (I disagree, as anything with a $ attached to it IS the perview of the BudComm). 

Yet, I review the Citizen's article and wonder - so why are they now "sharing" the letter, that they have to get input from their leadership / admins and the teachers' union?

This tells me that it is only expedient to insist on their decision making rights when they want, and then not when convenient.

"This is the public sector," DeMinico explained to the board.