The head of Hawaii’s largest union says he will seek to alter the state open records law in the coming legislative session to limit access to information about public employee salaries.

Randy Perreira, executive director of the 43,000 member Hawaii Government Employees Association, told Civil Beat Wednesday that he has two main concerns about the publication of salaries by Civil Beat:

• The names and salaries of law enforcement employees.
• The exact salaries of any employee whose salary doesn’t come from the general fund.

Perreira said he would also prefer that the names of most employees weren’t released, but didn’t expect the Legislature to go that far, given that the information is available in the rest of the nation.

“To ask that nothing can be disclosed, that would be counter to what’s publicly available in the other 49 states,” he said.

The interview came in response to an e-mail Perreira sent his members earlier this month.

In a Sept. 14 e-mail, he acknowledged the legality of Civil Beat’s publication of the salary information.

“We have had to inform those who called that the disclosure of salary information as provided by Civil Beat was in fact legal,” he wrote. “The information was properly requested under Chapter 92F-12, Hawaii Revised Statutes. In releasing the information, the Human Resources staffs of the employers were complying with the law.”

But he also said that Civil Beat’s stories “outraged many public employees.” Civil Beat has published the names, salaries and job titles of thousands of state employees in an effort to make more transparent how the state is spending taxpayer money. (To read those articles: state, University of Hawaii, Legislature and
Hawaii Health Systems Corp..

Under the state’s open records law the names, salaries and positions of public service employees are among many details of their employment that are a matter of public record. (Their job descriptions, education and training background, previous work experience and business address and phone number also all are public by law.) The law requires only salary ranges be made public for unionized employees.

In his Sept. 14 e-mail, Perreira said HGEA doesn’t believe it was “right” for Civil Beat to publish the names and salaries of public service employees and promised that the union will be asking lawmakers to make changes to the law “to prevent this from happening again.”

He went on to say that “employees are entitled to a measure of privacy and should be afforded basic dignity and respect in doing their jobs. Splashing the salary information about rank-and-file employees online does not reflect the values that we in Hawaii hold dear.”

That e-mail came on the heels of a Sept. 10 letter from Perreira to Civil Beat, which was published on the site.

Civil Beat chatted with Perreira Wednesday to ask what he’s looking to accomplish in seeking changes to the law.

“Appointees clearly should be fair game, it should be public record — that’s fine,” Perreira said. “The law protects actual salaries for those in bargaining units, but allows for ranges — so be it. But we’d argue there has to be some adjustments to what can be disclosed under the law … I think there is value to the public in knowing what public service employees make, but at the core of the issue, I don’t know why you’d need to know their names.”

Perreria said the HGEA believes criminal investigators and law enforcement employees should be exempt from the law.

The law already protects current and former law enforcement employees involved in an undercover capacity from being publicly disclosed.

“There’s no protection to exclude certain classes of employees and for these, it’s not a good idea,” he said. “Criminal investigators and law enforcement should be exempt because their names and salary information being public can compromise them.”

As an example, he said having the name and salary information of a fraud investigator made public could make the individual vulnerable to being coerced by potential targets.

“The determination of who and how certain employees should be protected should be for the employer to define,” he said. “We’re not in a position to define it, but that discussion should be had.”

The second issue that concerns Perreira is union employees whose salaries are not paid from the general fund. The exact salaries of some of these employees are public even though only a pay range for the same position would be released if they were in a department supported by the general fund.

He gave the state Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs as one example, noting the DCCA’s budget comes from a special fund that regulated businesses pay into.

“Take a clerk at the DCCA who is classified to perform the same job duties as another clerk in, say the Transportation Department or another office down the hall,” he said. “For the DCCA, because they’re exempt, their exact pay is made public.”

He said the HGEA in January will “seek to have some form of legislation introduced to address some of the more serious concerns” with the open records law.