April 16, 2004

Law - Maryland High Court Rules University of Md. Coaches' Contracts are Public

As the Baltimore Sun reports in this story today:

The state's highest court ordered the University of Maryland yesterday to release its pay packages for two high-profile coaches - a ruling that is likely to lay bare the contract of any public employee.

UM officials, who for two years fought requests for the coaches' deals, said yesterday that they need to review the Court of Appeals decision in a suit brought by The Sun before revealing the contracts of basketball coach Gary Williams and football coach Ralph Friedgen. * * *

Williams and Friedgen reportedly earn more than $1 million annually. But it is unclear how their packages break down among state salaries, incentives, endorsements or bonuses.

In turning down The Sun's requests for the contracts in 2002, the university said it needed to make public only the coaches' base salaries because their contracts were private personnel documents. A similar argument has long shielded the contracts of other top state employees.

But in yesterday's unanimous decision, the court ruled that the coaches' actual contracts must be made public, asserting that the contracts were the underpinning of their state pay.

The contracts are "the transaction of state business," the court stated, in a ruling written by Chief Judge Robert M. Bell. "It is clear the employment contracts ... are exactly the types of records to which the Legislature intended the public to have access."

The 39-page decision is University System of Maryland, et al. v. The Baltimore Sun Company, et al., and the Court's headnote reads:
Records evidencing a contract or agreement between a State employee an d a third party, which provides income to that employee and to which the State entity employing that employee is not a party, when the subject of a Maryland Public Information Act (MPIA) request, are subject to in camera review to determine whether they are financial info.
In addition, the Sun report continues:
In a separate part of the ruling, in which one judge dissented, the judges said lower courts should decide whether the university also has to make public the coaches' contracts with third parties such as sports apparel companies. If the lower court finds that those contracts are "closely connected" with the coaches' roles with the teams, the ruling stated, those contracts should be released.

Posted by Marcia Oddi at April 16, 2004 04:43 PM