Illinois Becomes More Transparent... Not

By Sean Stillmaker in News on Dec 5, 2010 5:00PM

Our legislators persevered through a perilous election season where they touted transparency, reform and ending business as usual. Part of their first official act on the job was getting in tune with their idea of transparency. The Illinois General Assembly has decided performance evaluations of all Illinois public employees shall remain top secret and out of the hands of the public.

Gov. Pat Quinn made an amendatory veto to HB 5154 that only exempted performance evaluations of law enforcement officers. His reasoning was criminal suspects or defendants could use them to undermine a police investigation or attack the credibility of an officer.

But he doesn’t have to worry about that now because all public employee evaluation reports will be exempt from Freedom of Information requests. The Senate overrode Quinn’s amendatory veto 48-3 and the House overrode it 77-36.

If you want to find out if your child’s teacher was found drinking on the job, forget it. If you think an officer has been cited in the past for physical aggression, you won’t know.

“If you ask the taxpayers ‘Are you more interested in reading the evaluations of public employees or the public employees being fairly treated by their supervisors and doing a good job,’ I think they’d choose the latter,” State Sen. Dale Righter (R-Matoon) told Fox Illinois.

Well, Dale, we’re never going to find out now if that employee is doing a good job. The public employee that we all pay for with our tax dollars. The public employee who’s probably got better health benefits and a pension that we all pay for with our tax dollars.