Kasich wrong on ‘sunshine’

COLUMBUS

A long time ago, in a state far, far away, I was a business reporter.

OK, it wasn’t that long ago in the greater scheme of things — about 17 years or so. And it wasn’t that far away — it was in Iowa.

During my formative cub reporter years, there was a car dealer planning to build a new dealership. Or maybe he was buying (and subsequently closing) another longtime dealership. I’ve blocked the details from my memory.

Whatever the case, this guy was sensitive. Since car dealers are big advertisers, our coverage evidently had to be sensitive, too. So one day, the publisher walked me over to the car dealer’s office and we sat down for an interview — me asking the questions, the car dealer answering them in terse fashion while one of the owners of the newspaper sat by and listened.

Bare bones stuff

It was bare bones stuff — location of the building, why he was doing it. Then the publisher walked me back to the office, I wrote the story and dutifully returned to the car dealer to get his approval. The final story was about six sentences of journalistic tripe.

I’d like to say my interaction with that individual was unique, but I cannot. Businesspeople often are overly sensitive, and with good reason. They work hard to establish their companies and make them profitable, and they don’t want reporters sniffing around, writing stuff and driving their customers away.

The beauty of running a private business is these folks don’t have to talk to the media. They don’t have to open their financial books to public scrutiny. They don’t have to justify their hiring and firing decisions. That’s the way it should be.

But that’s not the case when it comes to government. When public tax dollars are at play, jerk reporters, like me, and the non-jerk public, like you, get to look at the financial books and see who is being hired and fired.

We get to question the rationale behind decisions that will affect the public interest, and we have a duty to disclose cronyism and corruption.

That’s a fact of life that most politicians accept — at least the ones who don’t want to risk offending the people who buy ink by the barrel.

But the setup is rubbing Gov.-elect John Kasich wrong. He wants to run the government more like a business, and he doesn’t understand why everything has to be out in the open.

He wants to hire the best people, but some of those people are corporate bigwigs who don’t want the public or their companies knowing that they’re considering a career change.

He wants to convince new and existing companies to expand in Ohio, but he doesn’t want negotiation details to slip out and ruin sensitive business deals.

He wants the media to trust that his cabinet picks will always do the right thing without making them explain their relationships to the employees they will oversee.

“I find myself tripping over the anthills on the way to the pyramid,” he told Statehouse reporters last week. “We have so many stupid rules and regulations that prevent us from getting the best people to come in here. You just can’t believe it.”

Then, motioning to reporters, he added, “And I blame it on all of you, all this transparency, conflicts and all this other stuff. Let me just tell you, it is a problem to get quality people to come to work in the government.”

Comments like that are going to come back to haunt the governor-elect, especially when a brouhaha breaks over some knucklehead decision made by a subordinate at a state agency.

And then jerk reporters, like me, will redouble our digging to find out what else a state government run like a private business is trying to hide.

Marc Kovac is The Vindicator’s Statehouse correspondent. E-mail him at mkovac@dixcom.com or on Twitter at OhioCapitalBlog.