Pay, benefits aren't top secret

As a public service, Kootenai County taxing districts, open the windows and let the bright light of disclosure shine on your budgets.

Of particular interest: The specific pay and benefits costs for every one of your employees in the coming year's budget.

The goal isn't to humiliate anyone or encourage jealousies within departments. It's to give citizens information they're entitled to; information that is critical to their ability to make the best decisions about how they should be taxed and governed. The fact that in many cases, more than 80 percent of a taxing entity's budget is employee compensation, this frequently sheltered information should be front and center.

A couple years ago, The Press collected information and published the highest salaries of all the public employees in Kootenai County. More recently, we gathered data and published a series on union impact on taxpayers, and we included a full-page chart that compared public union employee benefits with those of employees from six different Kootenai County businesses. In both cases, the newspaper received tremendous feedback - mostly positive from the taxpayers and mostly negative from those whose livelihoods are paid for by the taxpayers. (We do acknowledge that these public employees are taxpayers, too.)

But the truth is, great effort and expense was required to gather, assimilate, break down and compare data that should already be prominently posted on every taxing entity's website. And it should be done as simply as possible. If you'd like to see a good example of how employee pay can be shared with the public, go to ouridaho.com. This feature of the Idaho Freedom Foundation's website allows anyone to peruse the payroll of, for example, all Coeur d'Alene city and school district employees.

The problems, though, are that the information in some cases is outdated and only wages are represented. As our union series illustrated, benefits comprise an enormous piece of the overall compensation picture. The whole picture is what the public wants to see and has every right to see.

It won't take more time and expense. Quite the opposite, in fact. Posting it once will save taxing entities the rigmarole of responding to potentially hundreds of individual requests - all needing to be fulfilled completely and in timely fashion.

Taxing entities can wait for an ultimatum of some kind. As a mandate of education reform, for instance, all Idaho school districts must now negotiate with employees in the open and then report to the public exactly how much pay and benefits its employees will receive. By voluntarily posting this information as standard procedure, other taxing entities will build greater trust and goodwill with the people they serve. That alone is worth the effort.