So there I was, standing beside the lawyer who in 1993 wrote the opinion for the state Office of Information Practices that 17 years later resulted in Civil Beat publishing his salary for all the world to see.

Hugh Jones, a deputy attorney general and president of the Hawaii State Bar Association, had come to our offices to participate in a Beatup about the judicial nomination process and — yes — the secrecy (they prefer confidentiality) surrounding the bar’s advisory role.

And the day before he arrived, we printed his salary. He still showed up. And he was laughing. Life had come full circle. An opinion he wrote had affected him personally, 17 years later. The calls he had received from people who read his salary on Civil Beat weren’t about how unfortunate it was that we had shared his pay; they were about how low his salary was after more than two decades as a lawyer with the state. It was a price he was willing to pay, he said, because he loved the work.

Some other state employees didn’t feel quite the same way. One told me she felt “violated.” Another felt a lack of respect, after a year that saw state employees take a double digit increase in health insurance and, for many, a 9.23 percent cut in pay, because of furloughs.

I wrote about our thinking before we published the list of more than 14,000 salaries this week, so I don’t want to repeat myself. But it’s key to remember that the law, as Jones noted in 1993, is based on the idea that “the public has a right to know what public employees are making, at least in part, to judge whether it is worth the expense.”

Yes, the people on the list really are public employees. And the law states that the information about their salaries is public. For a good reason: Public employees are compensated with tax dollars so there’s a strong interest in ensuring that the money is well spent and in reducing any potential for corruption. Without sharing the names, the latter is almost impossible.

I’ll give you an example. One public servant wrote and described what happened in a state office after people became aware of what we had published.

“Some folks here are very embarrassed that the whole world can see how little they make, and that’s an unfortunate consequence of the story.  But, on the good side, the information gleaned from looking up colleagues’ pay, has confirmed people’s suspicions about people getting more pay than what their colleagues or underlings feel they deserved — a robust debate has been generated.  All state employees know that merit-based, performance-based-pay is a fiction in state government, and your piece has exposed employees’ own frustration with the foolishness and unfairness of the civil service, union-rule-based pay system. Over here, people were rolling their eyes at a flagrant sick-leave abuser being paid better than many others, and that some subordinates receive more pay than the head of our office.”

I hope more people, journalists and non-journalists, seek public records in Hawaii. I hope it’s clear to those of who you’ve been following Civil Beat that they’re at the heart of the work we do. We’re going to keep asking tough questions. The day after we published the articles on state pay, we reported how every cent was spent by the state to participate in the Shanghai Expo and lure more Chinese tourists to Hawaii, Accounting for Hawaii’s Shanghai Trip. And just as we did with state pay, we shared the original document we received from the state with our readers. We’ll keep doing that.

We believe in open and transparent government. We’re going to publish information that is required to be publicly available. Maybe the government will do more of the same if we show officials what’s possible. Government records should be kept and managed in such a way that the public can most easily access them.

Sharing public information on critical issues such as government spending is core to Civil Beat’s mission. We’ll share our experience gathering what is supposed to be public information, and we’ll share the information we gather.

If you missed our articles, here’s a list:

• Civil Beat Shares Hawaii State Employee Salaries
• Hawaii’s Highest Paid State Employees
• Hawaii’s Lowest Paid State Workers
• How Everyone Knew My Salary

And if you want to learn more about our thinking at Civil Beat, you might want to check out an interview I did with Rep. Gene Ward for his “Better Government” show produced by Olelo. Here are the links:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ml1DVIxUdEg 
   
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZUfFZewdHo
   
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0-fEJ8jtLE

Better government and openness, we think they go together.

The story goes on. And it only gets more interesting.