Not quite done with Bozeman yet

Just when the City of Bozeman thought it had the privacy fiasco taken care of -- and just when I thought the issue was settled and we could move on -- something new crops up.

Late last week, a city employee sent an e-mail to Bozeman city commissioners, claiming that the explanation of city hiring procedures the commissioners got during their June 22 meeting was inaccurate. That explanation had told the commissioners that providing Web passwords on a background check form was voluntary. The e-mail's author, whose name was not given, said this was not the case, that the passwords were tacitly required from job applicants.

Now the city has announced an official investigation of its hiring practices, the Bozeman Daily Chronicle reports. The commission decided at a June 29 meeting that it will hire an outside authority to conduct the investigation, which will look into "how and when during the hiring process that city job candidates were presented with a waiver form asking for their log-in codes, whether the candidate was told that providing the information was voluntary and how candidates’ Web sites were reviewed," the Chronicle said. The city will look into every new hire in the past three years, the alleged period during which the city asked for passwords.

Local CBS station KBZK quotes City Commissioner Eric Bryson:

"I want to know if there were distinctions between the departments. Were there standards developed for what was considered appropriate content on someone's personal page, how the applicants were told when the review of their sites would occur and for how long they could expect the city to access those sites," Commissioner Eric Bryson said.

Seems like they're more or less looking for the answers to the questions I asked on day one, the questions that remained mostly unanswered even after the city closed the matter.

To me, though, this is the worst part. Again, from the Chronicle article:

In addition, commissioners said they received another e-mail stating that a city employee retaliated against a citizen for criticizing the hiring policy. The employee told the citizen’s public-sector employer that the citizen was improperly using their official title on personal correspondence.

Retaliation? Really? A city employee who felt threatened by criticism of a policy goes ahead and hamstrings somebody who cared enough to point out the bad policy? Come on.

Related posts:

1. Late afternoon Bozeman fiasco update
2. Bozeman approves hiring investigation, releases whistleblower’s e-mail
3. A letter to the Bozeman city attorney
4. Bozeman backtracks on privacy matters
5. Rumors about Bozeman’s evil policy still bouncing around the Web