HELENA - A Bozeman nonprofit group has sued to obtain the annual salaries and other compensation information for all state government employees in Montana.
The Montana Policy Institute last week filed a lawsuit against the state Department of Administration and director Janet Kelly for failing to provide it with actual compensation information for state workers. It did not seek the separate information for Montana university system employees.
The case is pending before District Judge Dorothy McCarter in Helena.
The institute cited right-to-know provisions and open-document provisions of the Montana Constitution and state law as reasons why the information should be made public. Any individual privacy concerns are outweighed by the merits of public disclosure, it said.
"We want to know what each state employee made, with bonus and OT (overtime) - the W-2 number," the institute's president, Carl Graham, said Thursday. "We started in 2010 and wanted the previous years. Now we want the most up-to-date numbers."
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Sheryl Olson, deputy director of the Department of Administration, said she couldn't comment on the case because the agency hadn't been officially served with the lawsuit yet.
The attorneys handling the lawsuit were J. Colleen Herrington and Arthur Wittich, who is a Republican state senator from Bozeman.
Upon request, the Department of Administration now will provide the hourly wage of an individual state employee, or, in electronic format, a spreadsheet showing hourly wages of all state employees.
However, it will not provide a list of how much all state employees were paid annually, including base, overtime, other salary, bonus pay and buyouts or early retirement, and whether they are full- or part-time workers, Graham said.
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Graham asked Rep. Gordon Vance, R-Bozeman, to make the initial request last year.
In an email response last September attached to the lawsuit, Olsen told Vance that while the state accounting system "does a great job in processing payroll and tax payments for state employees, it was not set up to create customized reports. Furthermore, we do not have the staff to customize reports."
She estimated it would take 30 hours and cost $723 to program the data, but added that the agency lacks the additional staff needed to produce "custom reports for outside entities."
Graham later offered to have the Policy Institute pay the cost.
In an Oct. 1 letter, Olson wrote Graham saying, "We are committed to fulfilling the request of every individual and organization seeking information about state government. However, your request exceeds our capacity. We do not plan to revisit this issue."
She added, "While Montana's right-to-know laws require state agencies to provide the public with existing information, they do not require state agencies to reprogram existing information to satisfy each and every public records request."
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Olsen said the department had already provided extensive information on 13,000 state employees to the Montana Policy Institute. The additional information sought would require reprogramming 28,000 pages of information, she said.
"As we completed our analysis of producing this report, we have concluded that we will not provide custom reports to the public," Olsen said.
In an interview, Graham said many state governments post the salaries of their employees online. In other cases, groups like the Policy Institute have obtained the information and posted it.
"We think the taxpayers should know what they're paying their employees," he said. "They're the owners. They're the ones paying the bills."
He said Montana's open-document laws are behind the times technologically.
"They were written in the 1980s when fax machines were cutting edge," Graham said. "There's no teeth. You can get stonewalled very easily."
If the institute prevails, Graham said it hasn't decided yet whether to list the names with the salaries or just the job titles and pay, because "there is a voyeuristic aspect to it."
The Montana Policy Institute is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, free-market think tank focusing on state issues. It is funded by more than 400 Montana members and like-minded foundations, Graham said.
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