Good morning and happy Sunshine Week.

The recognition of government transparency is apropos. Hillary Rodham Clinton, a likely candidate for president, held a press conference last week to explain her use of a private email server and to tell reporters that she’d deleted half of the messages. Clinton’s purge is presumably because the messages contained the intricacies of hot yoga, but at least one columnist believes the entire performance event boiled down to one message to the media: Go to hell.

Republicans naturally pounced on Clinton’s email fiasco, a few of them are considering running for president. And a few of them, notably Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, and U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, have all used private email accounts to conduct public business.

Meanwhile, New York’s Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo is under fire for instituting a system that automatically deletes state workers’ emails after 90 days. It wasn’t long ago Cuomo and his staff were discovered to use secret messages to skirt New York’s public records law. A similar system was discovered in Maine last year during an ethics probe of the Maine Center of Disease Control and its former director Sheila Pinette.

We apparently don’t have to worry about Gov. Paul LePage’s emails. He claimed several years ago that he abandoned email because reporters and others seeking to use the Freedom of Access Act can’t “FOAA my brain.”

Speaking of the governor, state Rep. John Martin, D-Eagle Lake, wants to give him — and legislators — a raise. Martin’s bill to raise the governor’s salary from $70,000 to $120,000 has a public hearing Monday. The proposed increase would still be nearly $10,000 less than what Department of Health and Human Services Commissioner Mary Mayhew made in 2013 and nearly $44,000 less than Pinette’s old salary.

The LePage administration gave Pinnette a new job at the DHHS, but her new salary, and Mayhew’s are unknown. That’s because Open Checkbook, the website the LePage administration created in 2012 to the applause of government transparency watchdogs, hasn’t been updated.

Walker coming to Maine?

There could be nothing to this, but a blog post by the law firm Preti Flaherty suggested that Gov. Scott Walker will visit Maine sometime in the near future. The post was written in the context of LePage’s push for a right-to-work bill and looming protests by the state’s labor unions.

Walker’s communications staff did not respond to requests for comment over the weekend and neither did LePage’s staff.

Walker was in New Hampshire last week to lay the groundwork for his presumed presidential run. During that visit the union slaying governor promised to return to the Granite State many more times. Perhaps Walker, who last week made Wisconsin the 25ht right-to-work state, will make a pitstop to coincide with the public hearing on right-to-work proposal here.

A public  hearing on the bill has not yet been scheduled.

Budget hearings continue

The Legislature’s budget-writing committee will continue its public hearings on the governor’s two-year budget plan. The Department of Administrative and Financial Services and its sub-agencies will present budget initiatives Monday morning, while the Department of Corrections will present its budget in the afternoon.

The light

The Maine Freedom of Information Coalition will present its annual Sunshine award Monday at noon in the State House Welcome Center.

This is a big thrill for the Portland Press Herald because the award will go to the newspaper’s courts and crime reporter Scott Dolan. In January Dolan had the guts to challenge a gag order issued by District Court Judge Jeffrey Moskowitz. Moskowitz later apologized to Dolan in court.

 

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