Nebraska lieutenant governor resigns; scandal would be secret in S.D.
The political world of South Dakota’s southern neighbor was rocked today by the sudden resignation of the state’s lieutenant governor Rick Sheehy after a public records request by the Omaha World-Herald discovered he had placed more than 2,000 phone calls on his state-issued cell phone to four women who were not his wife. (His wife filed for divorce last summer.)
Read about the issue here and here.
Sheehy had bad luck to be living in Nebraska. If he were in South Dakota, his indiscretions would still be secret.
South Dakota’s open records law specifically excludes “correspondence, memoranda, calendars or logs of appointments, working papers, and records of telephone calls of public officials or employees.”
This is one of the areas where South Dakota’s open records law is much more limited than other states and the federal government.
