EDITORIAL: Gov. Bruce Rauner gets carried away with the black marker of secrecy

When will Bruce Rauner come to understand that he is a governor, not a CEO?

A CEO can call the shots, but a governor must gain the consent of others. Rauner has found this problematic.

A CEO is free to keep much of his work secret, at least from the general public, but a governor must be as transparent as possible. Rauner, to judge by a new analysis of redacted state emails, has a problem with this, too.

And the weirdest thing, if we may say, is that we’re not always sure what the governor is trying to hide. Sometimes, when the veil is lifted, he’s revealed as a guy just doing his job.

An analysis by WBEZ radio of almost 450 pages of state government emails found this week that state lawyers blacked out portions of more than half the documents given to lawmakers. The emails were requested by a legislative committee investigating recurring breakouts of deadly Legionnaires’ disease at a state-run home for veterans. The committee got the redacted emails from the Rauner administration. WBEZ got them from other public sources, often without redactions.

If the Rauner administration had blacked out information that obviously should not be public, such as social security numbers, nobody could complain. But, as WBEZ found, much more than that was redacted. Some information, it is fair to surmise, was blacked out simply because it might have proved mildly politically inconvenient for the governor.

In an email by a state agency preparing for media interviews, for example, a question was posed as to whether children would be safe in a park on the grounds of the veterans’ home. The answer — also included in the email — was, yes, children would be safe.

Should that email have been a state secret? Of course not. But it was. The Rauner administration blacked out both the question and answer.

Other emails, WBEZ found, were missing altogether. They were not included in the emails handed over to the committee.

Notably missing, for example, was an email chain in August 2015, that began with a correspondence from the son of a Legionnaires’ disease victim, Eugene Miller. The son, Tim Miller, condemned the state for withholding information about Legionnaires’ at the home as his father lay dying. The email chain, WBEZ reports, apparently went all the way up to Nirav Shah, the state public health director.

We see no legal grounds for the Rauner administration withholding the emails from anybody. But we can understand any political reluctance.

Give a man a hammer and everything looks like a nail. Give him a black marker, and everything looks like a secret.

Especially when he’s running for re-election.

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