No special treatment for government workers

Look no farther than Beaufort County to see why America’s electorate is mad, frustrated and distrustful of government.

Here, we have a government insider (a lawyer working for Beaufort County) providing inside information to another government employee (the Hilton Head Island High School principal) that is not made available to the mere riffraff (citizens without connections).

That elitism is wrong, and it is exactly the type of thing that is inflaming the nation.

Principal Amanda O’Nan was given special treatment. She was tipped that a report she did not want to be public was going to be released to the public. Furthermore, she was told when it would be released. And she was advised that it would be released “absent a court instruction to the contrary.”

Beaufort County outlined for her how she might keep the public documents secret, and how much time she had to do it.

That is not the county’s role. It would be wrong even if the county offered this tipping service to everyone, which it decidedly does not do.

O’Nan took full advantage of the inside information. Filing as a secret plaintiff under the pseudonym John Doe, which in itself is an absurd twist on justice, she did indeed seek a “court instruction to the contrary.” As a result, she was temporarily able to keep public information about public officials out of the hands of the public.

The investigative report was prepared by the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office in response to a complaint by O’Nan’s estranged husband and another person against one of its officers. The misconduct claim included an allegation that the officer was having an affair with Amanda O’Nan with the school being a late-night meeting place. O’Nan has said her relationship with the officer, who resigned, was strictly professional. And the Beaufort County School District looked into it and said she did nothing wrong.

But that does not erase Beaufort County’s abuse of the public’s right to know. And the county’s actions fueled public distrust of government.

The county disregarded the spirit of the state’s Freedom of Information Act, through which this newspaper sought the investigative report.

The county had the requested information readily available, but instead intended to stretch out its release to the full extent of the law, which is 15 days.

County attorney Tom Keaveny said the heads-up was not special treatment for O’Nan. He said the county was not encouraging her to go to court to try to block release of the documents.

He said “the personalities (named in the documents) played no role” in the county’s decision to inform O’Nan prior to releasing the documents.

And he said, “When requests come in and they are of a very personal nature, I believe that it isn’t uncommon to notify the folks that are affected.”

But he could not readily come up with a single other person to be given this special treatment.

No, the common citizen does not get personal tips from the county administration. And nobody cares if matters of a personal nature are released about the common citizen. It happens every day.

Justice is supposed to be blind. In this case, it wasn’t, and the public got an eyeful on how things really work. It did not have to be this way, and it should not have been this way.

This story was originally published September 12, 2016 at 10:02 AM with the headline "No special treatment for government workers."