For the past year, this newspaper has gathered salary information of local government employees from around this region. And, in today’s edition, we begin the first of a three-day series about this data and this issue.

The bulk of this tedious work, however, is evidenced at our two Web sites – TriCities.com and SWVAToday.com – with a searchable, online database that includes salaries from 65 towns, cities, counties and school systems in Southwest Virginia and Northeast Tennessee.

Just go to one of the Web sites and punch in keyword "salaries." The names, positions and salaries of more than 17,000 local government workers are included in this database.

WHY DID we do this?

Because it’s your money, and you have the right to know how it’s being spent. Salaries make up anywhere from one quarter to one half of the local government budgets you fund.

Many of you taxpayers will find this information interesting and be gratified that your regional newspaper is performing its watchdog role and making this information available to you. Many of the employees who are listed in this database will be angry, however: They will contend that this is nobody’s business and that this is an invasion of their privacy.

Those employees are wrong – not just philosophically but legally.

This is public information required to be disclosed under the freedom of information laws in the state of Tennessee and the commonwealth of Virginia.

NO ONE’S privacy has been invaded: No personal information is disclosed, only name, rank and serial number – or in this case, salary number.

It took a year for us to get this information from every jurisdiction we knew existed in this two-state region. (If we’ve missed any, let us know.)

Several local jurisdictions complied with the public records laws immediately. Among the shining examples: the tiny hamlet of Glade Spring, Va.

Several others thumbed their nose at state law for months and had to be threatened with lawsuits.

THESE WERE not idle threats. Our attorneys were waiting in the wings to sue jurisdictions that failed to turn over these public records. And had we sued, we also would have tried to recoup our attorney fees.

To this day, the city of Johnson City, Tenn., has not fully complied with our FOIA request because it never provided us with first names, only initials. It even took Johnson City four months to provide us with the salaries, and even then, the city demanded in exchange that we share with it the data from the other jurisdictions.

We refused and kindly informed Johnson City that if it wanted the data, it could file FOIAs with the other 64 agencies, like we did.

The Bristol Herald Courier is not the first newspaper to publish local government salaries and will not be the last. As more and more news consumers migrate to the Web, you will see more and more databases published online. (We don’t have the space to publish 17,374 salaries in the newspaper.)

AS I WROTE earlier in this column, this project is not unprecedented. I personally did a similar project last year at another Virginia newspaper. I knew what to expect: threats of lawsuits, allegations that we had invaded people’s privacy, name-calling. And I expect similar backlash from some local government employees in this region.

But the fact is when you go to work for an agency funded by taxpayers, you forfeit disclosure of your name, position and salary. Period.

The law says so, and for obvious reasons: It’s the public’s money.

By putting this information online and doing it in a searchable database, we are allowing readers with Internet access to make salary comparisons across jurisdictional lines, and to check every salary in their hometown or county to see where their tax dollars are going.

WE ARE NOT making any editorial statements about government workers being overpaid or underpaid. We simply are giving you the information, along with articles and graphics that further illustrate the data.

Some of the employees listed in this database will demand to know the salaries of the journalists employed by this newspaper. Fair is fair, they will say. That demand is specious, however, for we are not paid by taxpayers, but by a private-sector company.

Some local government workers upset at the disclosure of their salaries might even compare this project with what The Roanoke Times did earlier this year when it posted on its Web site the Virginia State Police database on residents who have concealed weapons permits.

The comparison is not apt. First off, that database was posted with raw data, including the home addresses of judges and police officers and every other citizen with a permit. Roanoke, an otherwise fine newspaper, had to remove that database immediately because the decision to post it online was made unilaterally by one uninformed employee.

CONVERSELY, WE created the database ourselves using only public information. We even deleted salaries under $10,000 although many jurisdictions provided such information; we deleted it because the commonwealth of Virginia requires only salaries of $10,000 or more to be disclosed. We carried over that standard to the state of Tennessee.

Our intent is not to embarrass local government workers, only to inform you where your tax dollars are going. You can judge for yourselves whether you’re getting your money’s worth.

J. Todd Foster is managing editor of the Bristol Herald Courier and can be reached at (276) 645-2513 or jfoster@bristolnews.com