Citizens can’t fairly judge councilors

We’d like to know why three of the seven Baker City Council members didn’t want to hire Tim Johnson as city manager.

We know part of the answer: The Idaho firm the city hired to investigate Johnson’s background recommended the City Council not offer him the job.

But city residents are entitled to the whole answer.

To that end, we’ve petitioned District Attorney Matt Shirtcliff  to order city officials to give us the complete background report compiled by Freeman and Associates of Middleton.

Even though the public’s money — about $1,500 — paid for that information, city officials contend that the public shouldn’t see everything their money bought.

Specifically, interim City Manager Tim Collins, in a letter responding to the Herald’s request for the complete report, wrote that the city will not release information that “consists generally of statements from previous co-workers, supervisors, and neighbors regarding Mr. Johnson’s work history and personal character.”

Nor did the city supply the Herald with the part of the report in which Freeman and Associates recommended the City Council not hire Johnson.

Milo Pope, one of the councilors who opposed offering the job to Johnson, said he didn’t remember in detail Freeman’s concerns, but that they had to do with Johnson’s supervision of employees at a previous job in California.

Pope, like the other councilors, returned his copy of Freeman’s report to the city.

What troubles us is that, without access to Freeman’s complete report, it’s impossible for city residents to fairly judge the councilors they elected to office.

Did the four councilors who voted to hire Johnson — Dennis Dorrah, Beverly Calder, Clair Button and Aletha Bonebrake — act negligently or responsibly given the information in Freeman’s report?

Was the opposition from Pope and councilors Andrew Bryan and Sam Bass reasonable, based on the evidence Freeman presented? Or is the trio still fuming because their four colleagues fired Steve Brocato on June 9, and merely picking nits as regards Johnson’s work portfolio?

Residents can’t even try to answer those questions for themselves until they can see the whole of the report and read the same words that city councilors read.

Collins, in his letter to the Herald, contends that portions of the Freeman report are exempt from Oregon’s public records law — which in general favors releasing information rather than suppressing it — because the information was supplied by people who expected confidentiality.

The section of the public records law that Collins cited is designed to “encourage voluntary submission of relevant information to public bodies, with some reasonable assurance that the information will be kept confidential,” according to the Oregon Attorney General’s Public Records Manual.

But to qualify for that exemption to the records law, the city must also prove that releasing the information, again quoting from the AG’s manual, “would harm the public interest.”

Collins argues that disclosing the disputed sections of the Freeman report would harm the public interest because doing so would violate informants’ confidentiality and so discourage people in the future from expressing their opinions about candidates for important public jobs such as city manager.

That’s a legitimate concern. But it’s also a concern easily remedied by redacting informants’ names, or other information that could identify them,  from documents made available to the public.

The far greater harm to the public interest, it seems to us, is withholding information from citizens and thus preventing them from understanding how, and why, their elected officials make crucial decisions on their behalf.