Among the most important information citizens must have in order to assess their government is how much is being paid to which public servants for doing what jobs on behalf of taxpayers. Conscientious residents of Fairfax County can now find much of that key data about their local public servants by going to the Examiner Citizen Action Network at www.examiner.com/FairfaxCountySalary.
The purpose of ECAN is simple — to help interested taxpayers throughout the Washington region better understand what is being done with their hard-earned tax dollars by local governments. We inaugurate this new service with salary data (current as of April) for the more than 11,000 Fairfax County employees making $10,000 or more annually.
In the months ahead, ECAN will add local government salary databases for Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, as well as Alexandria and Arlington. Salary databases for the area’s public school systems will soon be part of ECAN, and we will be adding many other databases that will be helpful for local taxpayers to gain a more accurate idea of how their local public servants are performing. These databases could eventually cover a wide spectrum of information from tax assessments and payments, restaurant inspections, housing permits, officials expense reports, payments to settle legal claims and much, much more.
Our hope is that ECAN will become a valuable tool for local residents of all political persuasions and ideological perspectives. Our desire is to partner with established community groups in identifying and assembling the many databases local governments use on a routine basis, but which may be difficult or impossible to find for residents who don’t spend all day looking at Web sites. If there is sufficient interest among local residents, The Examiner will also host free half-day classes to help residents learn how to analyze the databases on ECAN.
It is important to note that public officials and employees sometimes don’t want to cooperate with efforts like ECAN that are meant to let the sun shine on the day-to-day operations of local government. This sad reality is illustrated in the Fairfax salary data being posted today. The Examiner requested current salary, title, department, most recent raise or bonus, tax dollars paid for health and pension benefits, gender, ethnicity and overtime pay. Merni Fitzgerald, Fairfax County’s Director of Public Information, refused to provide anything but the names, titles and salary.
Without the rest of the information The Examiner requested, it is, of course, impossible to do an independent analysis of Fairfax County government’s performance in areas such as gender and ethnic employment practices, abuse of overtime pay or favoritism in promotions and bonuses. The Examiner will continue to press for such data from Fairfax and other area governments. To see why this is so important, check out The Examiner’s Monday story on D.C. government overtime abuses on examiner.com.
In the meantime, we hope to hear from lots of readers and civic groups with comments and suggestions on ECAN.
