By PHIL DRAKE
HELENA – An attorney for the state of Montana on Wednesday told a judge there were no statutes requiring it to provide specific employee salary information requested by a Bozeman-based think tank, leaving the attorney for the plaintiff to say he was “baffled” by that argument.

The Montana Policy Institute (MPI) asked state 1st Judicial District Court Judge Dorothy McCarter through a writ of mandamus to order the state, the Department of Administration (DOA) and DOA Director Janet Kelly to grant its public records request.
Both sides said they will be submitting more evidence in the next few weeks and McCarter is expected to make a decision in early 2012.
MPI made multiple requests to DOA officials dating back to August 2010 for “state employee actual compensation data,” according to an affidavit by Carl Graham, president of MPI, which publishes Montana Watchdog.
The suit also asks for attorneys’ fees and costs.
Mike Manion, the DOA’s chief legal counsel, said the MPI request would involve 14,000 state employees including salary, hourly wage and overtime.
Manion said even though the information was available and MPI was willing to pay the estimated $700-$800 to gather the data, right-to-know laws did not require the state to program the data to satisfy such requests.
“But if they pay for it why would you care?” McCarter asked.
He said there are 300 time-reporting codes for earnings that would have to be reprogrammed and the state of Montana did not have the staffing or time to fulfill the request. And he said once the information was provided at the state level, it would likely trickle down to the county and city levels as well.
“It would present a significant burden,” he said.
MPI’s attorney Art Wittich, who is also a Republican state senator from Bozeman, disagreed.
“The Department of Administration position in my mind is baffling,” he said, adding the state had recently “spent millions” to computerize data.
“What they’ve done is admit the data exists,” he said.
He accused the DOA of playing a “cat and mouse game” with MPI and said the department was getting into “semantic differences.” He also said it was a “weak argument” to say the public would be requesting the information and added it should be available to the public.
Wittich said he also found it interesting that staff would not have time to provide the information via computer to MPI but would have the time to go through 28,000 pages of documents and redact private information.
He said he thought there were a “bazillion” consultants in Helena who could come up with a way to make the information available.
Manion said MPI wanted a customized report. He said MPI had made a specific request “and we told them as politely as we could that we don’t have that information.”
McCarter, who told both sides that she was a state employee, asked several questions of the attorneys. She said even though she had received a raise as a judge, “the state employee wage freeze is a sore subject with me.”
Graham and Randy Morris, bureau chief for the Human Resources Information Services Bureau, were both in the courtroom but were not asked to testify.