The government agency that oversees Houston’s two major airports — and whose boss stepped down suddenly and without explanation last month — says it does not want to make public a list of how much it pays its employees because the data is “sensitive security information” and its release could endanger passengers’ safety.
The Houston Airport System, which runs both Bush Intercontinental Airport and the smaller William P. Hobby Airport, is arguing that it should be allowed to withhold airport employees’ pay records for 2008, which Texas Watchdog had sought under the Texas Public Information Act.
Federal law says that airports can withhold “[a]ny information that the” federal Transportation Security Administration “has determined may reveal a systemic vulnerability of the aviation system, or a vulnerability of aviation facilities, to attack,” Assistant City Attorney Evelyn W. Njuguna wrote in a letter to state Attorney General Greg Abbott’s office.
That law, Njuguna wrote, says airports “must restrict disclosure of and access to sensitive security information . . . to persons with a need to know and must refer requests” for that information to the feds.
The letter says the federal government could determine that “the release of this information could compromise the measures designed for the security and safety at City’s airports for airport personnel, the traveling public, and the citizens of Houston.”
The airport system’s concern isn’t so much releasing the salary numbers, Njuguna said in a telephone interview Tuesday. “It’s not the amount that they make, it’s more so the names of the people,” she said. “Because TSA has said giving out information about employees who work in the airport or who have access to secured locations could” put airports at risk.
The airport and the city would be willing to release a list of numbers of how much the workers are paid, she said — but Texas Watchdog countered that a list of dollar amounts without names attached to them would be of little use to the public.
Was open government also a casualty of Sept. 11?
“This was not the type of information that Congress was anticipating when they passed the basic homeland security laws,” said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the non-profit Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press She called it “ludicrous.”
Said Keith Elkins, executive director of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas: “It appears the information you are requesting will most likely remain undisclosed due to alleged homeland security concerns. It’s a reality of the post-9/11 world we live in.”
The amount that public employees get paid is generally a public record in most states — Houston residents can find most city workers’ yearly pay amounts through online databases the Houston Chronicle has gleaned under the state public records law; ditto for Texas state employees’ pay records.
And not all airports try to shield their employees’ pay records from view. Pay records for airport workers in Los Angeles, Chicago and Nashville, just to name a few, are public records and have been posted online by newspapers in those cities (LA Daily News database at this link; Chicago Sun-Times 2007 database here; Nashville database available through The Tennessean, this reporter’s former employer). The Los Angeles database doesn’t include the names of airport police officers — just how much they made — but it does include the names and pay amounts for thousands of other people working at the airport, including clerks, guides, electricians, supply managers and even one “industrial hygienist” — 3,600 airport employees in all.
Houston Airport System workers’ pay has been in the news before. The airport gave away bonuses — from $300 to $1,000 — to about 400 workers in 2006, the Chronicle reported. In 2007, a group of airport janitors complained to the city council about an airport plan to rework their positions from three 8-hour shifts into two 10-hour shifts; the airport said it was just trying to be more efficient.
This also isn’t the first time that the city has tried to withhold records sought by Texas Watchdog. Mayor Bill White earlier this year sought to withhold portions of his calendar after Texas Watchdog requested it and e-mails between himself, his staff and developer Marvy Finger. The AG ruled in April that most of the information had to be released, but White could withhold information not pertaining to his official role as mayor.
The city also initially tried to black out city councilmembers’ addresses and names of their family members from copies of the personal financial statements the council filed earlier this year. Texas Watchdog challenged the redactions, and the city now says it will make the forms available with no information blacked out.
This wouldn’t be the first time that government officials have waved the banner of homeland security to try to close off basic information that would have easily been deemed public before the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
Earlier this year, a federal court in California ruled that Santa Clara County could not use the homeland security issue to withhold its computer data on land boundaries and other geographic data, which were open under that state’s public records laws.
Another example: Two years ago, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers deemed five major dams in four states as being at “high risk” of collapse, including Wolf Creek Dam on the Cumberland River in Kentucky.
The Corps declined to publicly release their detailed maps showing whose house would be flooded and whose would stay high and dry, saying homeland security concerns trumped the federal Freedom of Information Act. (Everyone knows there are population centers downriver of the dam, national FOI advocate Charles Davis told the Louisville Courier-Journal at the time: “It doesn’t take Osama in a cave to figure this out.”)
Getting information about homeland security itself can be even harder. People in New Jersey had trouble a few years ago finding out how their state was spending federal homeland security money, the AP reported. But one purchase did leak out: The city of Newark spent $300,000 of it to buy two air-conditioned garbage trucks.
Unfortunately for people wanting open government, the homeland security argument — and the accompanying secrecy — can carry the day. Abbott’s office ruled in 2007 that the Houston Airport System did not have to turn over organizational charts and other airport information — information not described in the ruling — because federal law gave TSA the authority to determine what records might be sensitive. Abbott’s predecessor, John Cornyn, now a U.S. senator, also punted to TSA when someone asked for information about San Antonio airport workers in 2002.
Just to drive home the point, go over to Chron.com’s repository of databases of public workers’ salaries in the Houston area. See which agencies you can search for. City of Houston? Check. Port of Houston? Check. The Houston school system? Check? But airport workers are nowhere to be found.
The airport system’s boss, Richard Vacar, retired suddenly in May. While Vacar hasn’t said much about why he left, Mayor Bill White told the Houston Chronicle in an interview late last month that he had concerns about a nonprofit set up by the airport several years ago — launched as an effort to allow Houston airport workers to offer their expertise consulting with airports in other countries, it is now building and running airports in other nations, including a $600 million ongoing project in Ecuador and a project in the planning stages in Costa Rica for which the nonprofit is kicking in $40 million.
From Chronicle columnist Rick Casey, who spoke to White about itjointly with, as did reporter Bradley Olson:
[White] said air system employees should work for the nonprofit only during “excess time,” and “in general, a well-run organization does not have much excess time for its employees.”
Vacar’s departure prompted Texas Watchdog to request access to numerous airport-related records under the Texas public records law, including the airport system’s 2008 payroll list.
The airport system argues that the state attorney general’s office should stay out of whether the payroll records are public, and instead should allow TSA to decide.
Texas Watchdog plans to craft its own letter to the attorney general and to TSA, arguing for the information’s release and rebutting the airport’s claims that payroll lists are sensitive security information.
As for the other records Texas Watchdog requested, the airport system says some will be made public soon, including Vacar’s calendar information and expense account data.
Other data, specifically, e-mail traffic between airport leadership and City Hall, bore a heavy price tag — about $5,000 for e-mails going back to Jan. 1, 2008.
The high cost estimate is largely due to a city employee having to go through 17 months of old e-mails that the city has archived on magnetic tapes, said Matt Hyde, the airport system’s chief technology officer. Part of the price tag would involve 12 weeks of uninterrupted staff time to do nothing but search for the e-mails in question, according to the city.
Texas Watchdog is instead modifying its request to seek e-mails going back only as far as April 1, 2009, in hopes of reducing the cost that would be incurred.
UPDATE: We updated this story Thursday afternoon to reflect that Chronicle columnist Rick Casey interviewed Mayor Bill White separately from reporter Bradley Olson.
