Let a thousand star chambers shine

With Sunshine Week just around the corner, State Administration Commissioner Dana Badgerow is singing a different tune: send in the clouds. Badgerow ruled last month that Minnesotans can no longer get home contact info for fellow citizens who serve on government boards, Pat Doyle reports in today’s Strib. It’s a reversal from last fall, when Badgerow agreed with citizens that the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency must reveal home contact info for members of its Climate Change Advisory Group, because state law presumes government data is public. What changed? The MPCA pushed as precedent the nonpublic nature of such info for government employees, license applicants, block club leaders, and members of state retirement fund and therapist boards, and Badgerow buckled (PDF link). What had been clear is now “vague.”Badgerow made Sunshine Week news last year when she banned IPAD, her department’s Information Policy and Analysis Division, from considering any more of a Park Rapids man’s open-records disputes with his watershed district — despite the fact that IPAD had favored him eight of ten times. Analysis by the Strib then showed the number of IPAD rulings falling even as the number of requests rose.