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Civil Beat has promised that it will look into how our government operates and share with you what it finds.

That’s one of the reasons we file open records requests with the state and city, to make accessible to you what is by law public, but is often by practice difficult at best for citizens to access themselves. As I’ve said before, we believe in the value of transparency and wish governments would do more to share public information.

Monitoring how public dollars are spent — making sure that they’re used wisely, fairly and equitably — is one of the fundamental roles of the press. A couple of weeks ago, we reported on the pay of more than 14,000 state employees.

• Civil Beat Shares Hawaii State Employee Salaries
• Hawaii’s Highest Paid State Employees
• Hawaii’s Lowest Paid State Workers

We are examining how the government spends its money — from compensation (e.g., judiciary, legislature, Honolulu government, and other public agencies) to public contracts. This week we’ll be examining compensation at the University of Hawaii.

The university spends about 63 percent of its more than $1 billion budget on salaries and benefits. That 63 percent is roughly what it receives in state tax dollars to run its operations.

So how the money is spent is something that should matter to all of us.

The issue of how the university spends its money is personal not just to the employees, but also to the students and their families, who pay tuition. They have a special stake in the game. How can a student decide whether how the state is spending her tuition money makes sense unless she can compare the pay of one of her professors with the pay of her other professors?

We’ll give that student and the rest of the public the information to make their own determination. But this time we’ll also provide more analysis in our report by Nanea Kalani. For example, did you know that at a minimum 12 percent of UH employees make six figure salaries, but that the total could be as high as three out of 10? (We can’t tell you the precise figure because of the salary range requirement, which might help explain why I think that while the range might be more comfortable for employees, it’s less valuable for citizens wanting to understand whether their money is being spent wisely.)

I think you’ll see that this latest round in our series on public employee salaries will shed more light on what work we value most and what work we value least.

One thing that has struck me from this research is not the high salaries, it’s that even with union representation we have people working for the government of Hawaii who earn so little that they may be eligible for federal food aid. Would the citizens of Hawaii really support that if they knew it was the case? How widespread a problem this is isn’t clear, again because of the requirement that only ranges be released for some jobs. But why would state officials offer on behalf of their citizens — or public unions accept — minimum salaries that are so low that people need assistance feeding themselves or their families?

The more we know as citizens about how our government works and how it’s spending our money — and yes, public employees are citizens, too — the more likely we are to make good decisions.

That, it seems to me, is what democracy is all about.

When you come to the site later this week, you’ll find stories about the highest paid employees of the university, and the employees who are making the least.

But perhaps most important, we will make the exact information we received freely available to everyone. This includes the names of more than 7,500 university employees, their salary or salary range, department and job title.

We’ve done quite a bit of work to analyze that public document and make it more useful. We’ll include an example of a sortable database to show you what we’re offering our full members. Members will be able to sort the data by any field. So, for example, if they want to sort the salaries from highest to lowest, they’ll be able to do that.

We hope that you find this service valuable, and look forward to continuing the discussion about how the state spends public money.