Deceit leads to distrust

There's no more poisonous word than "distrust" when it comes to the relationships between voters and the people they elect to represent them.

So when elected officials complain about the citizen anger they face routinely, when they express concern that mobs frothing at the mouth and firing off mean-spirited letters to the editor will dissuade conscientious candidates from ever seeking office, we refer them to that venomous word.

Distrust.

As public employees began passing the private sector in pay, benefits and job security, more than jealousy was aroused. Public employees immediately began undergoing increased scrutiny from taxpayers who saw their bank accounts dwindling to feed the growing appetite of the public sectors serving them.

We could not give a more explicit example of distrust than the latest revelation, forced by a public records request from this newspaper to the city of Coeur d'Alene, which was disclosed in Thursday's paper. The records request shows that in the two previous years, roughly half the city's benefited employees received merit pay raises of up to 5 percent.

That's news to taxpayers.

From The Press, Sept. 7, 2010:

[The city is] also seeking a 1 percent cost of living increase for its 300-plus employees.

That pay increase would equal $212,317, spread out over its 353 full-time equivalent positions, and must be agreed upon with the city's three unions. The city is contractually obliged to give annual 3 percent COLA raises to its employees, but renegotiated with the unions to the 1 percent offer this year.

Last year, it didn't give employees raises.

Shame on us for believing and reporting what city sources had told us, for accepting their word that no raises had been given the previous year. That belief was further bolstered by the fact that nobody at the city corrected the erroneous published statement that employees hadn't been given raises.

This summer, when we published a story citing the city's intent to award the union-mandated 3 percent cost of living increases, one person - just one - contacted us and said we needed to dig deeper; that the city was not disclosing merit raises in its discussions about pay.

The source was right. After asking different questions prompted by information from the source, we learned and shared with the public the truth: That 43 percent of the city's benefited employees would receive raises of up to 8 percent. For the three years combined, the merit pay pool is $750,000, a far cry from the more modest COLA disclosures.

Coeur d'Alene doesn't corner the market on payroll deceit. The more we dig, the more questions we ask, the more we're discovering that other taxing entities are not fully disclosing their employees' compensation.

Generally it's not a bold-faced lie so much as it's reluctance to put the facts clearly out there for the public to know. Example: Wednesday night, when the North Idaho College trustees granted President Priscilla Bell a 3 percent raise plus $3,500 for retirement, the agenda item could hardly have been more vague. It says, under Review of President's Contract:

FINANCIAL IMPACT: The financial impact is consistent with the president's contract from the prior year, and any changes agreed to by the board.

Does that say raise and additional benefits to you? In the meeting, the raise was referred to as "an adjustment."

We strongly endorse the idea of adjustments - adjustments in the way public servants disclose information that is near and dear to citizens. The issue isn't whether or not every public employee deserves what she or he is being compensated; the issue is that citizens have a right to know the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.