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A bill introduced last year in response to Civil Beat’s publishing of state and city government salaries has resurfaced and will receive a .

proposes altering the portion of the public disclosure law that requires the name and salaries of government employees be made public. It would instead only require that their “job title and salary range” be subject to disclosure.

The bill — and an identical — did not receive a hearing last session.

In addition to striking names and compensation from disclosure, the bill proposes removing the requirement to make public an employee’s:

“Business address, business telephone number, job description, education and training background, previous work experience, dates of first and last employment, position number, type of appointment, service computation date, occupational group or class code, bargaining unit code, employing agency name and code, department, division, branch, office, section, unit, and island of employment.”

HB 1356 will go before the House Committee on Labor and Public Employment. Rep. Karl Rhoads, the committee’s chairman, said he’s OK with employee names being public.

“I must admit, I’m looking forward to the testimony with bated breath. Personally, I don’t think it’s a big deal,” he told Civil Beat. “It’s really not the same as the private sector because we’re all paid for by taxpayer money.”

Rhoads said he’s more concerned about the part of the law requiring things like an employee’s education and training background, previous work experience, and dates of first and last employment to be made public.

As part of Civil Beat’s annual evaluation of how the state spends its single largest pot of money — on salaries and benefits for employees — we’ve filed requests under Hawaii’s asking for the names, positions and salaries of all state and city employees.

The bill’s preamble gives some of the history of the proposal:

In 2009, a local online news service made several requests for information on state employees’ salaries, which were later published on the online news website. In many instances, the employee’s name and specific salary were listed, causing concern that the availability of the information could place employees at greater risk of identity theft and raising other privacy issues.

While the legislature acknowledges the importance of open government and the disclosure of certain types of information for public inspection, it also recognized the need to balance open government with the right to privacy when it enacted the Uniform Information Practices Act in 1988.

HB 1356 was introduced by Rep. Karen Awana, who said she introduced the bill on behalf of her Senate colleagues, in particular Suzanne Chun Oakland.

“It’s really not my bill,” she said. “But I was surprised that, already on the first day of session, a hearing is scheduled. It may have traction.”

Awana added that some of her constituents have expressed concern about identity theft.

Civil Beat last session interviewed several of the co-sponsors of the Senate version of the bill.

At that time, the bill’s main sponsor, Sen. Pohai Ryan, said she could not point to a single instance of identity theft that occurred due to Civil Beat’s salary stories.

University of Hawaii media law professor Gerald Kato had said there are sometimes good reasons for open records that trump workers’ right to privacy. Nepotism and corruption are harder to spot when names are private. He said the measure threatened to “chip away at the edges” of the state’s public records law.