Government employees sometimes don't like it that the public can nose through their personnel records.

But the recent reporting on the alleged "fight club" run by employees at a state facility for the mentally retarded in Corpus Christi shows why it's important for those personnel records to be public.

The Dallas Morning News' Emily Ramshaw has done some great work in recent weeks on the employees (er, make that former employees), using information culled from public records.

Her April 6 story, if you didn't see it, said the state workers "were hired despite poor employment histories and little work experience beyond fast-food jobs," and pointed out that "two had already been disciplined by the Department of Aging and Disability Services, which runs the institutions for the mentally disabled."

Ramshaw's April 12 story, written with Ryan McNeill, showed that the employees working at such facilities "were paid millions of dollars in overtime last year, in some cases working the equivalent of a month's worth of 13-hour days ... sometimes with no choice, in high-stress, low-wage environments."

We want to make public the personnel files of the people involved, so we're posting now the files of the six people facing possible criminal charges in the case. They are:

Tim Dixon
D'Angelo Riley
Guadelupe de la Rosa
Vincent Johnson
Jesse Salazar
Stephanie Garza

And you can access them all at once via this link at Scribd.com, where we post many of our PDFs for easy viewing and sharing.

We got these personnel records by requesting them under the state's Public Information Act. We used a template of a PIA request letter available from the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas (whose new executive director, Keith Elkins, we profiled in a story published late yesterday). We sent our letter to the state Department of Aging and Disability Services, which runs the Corpus Christi State School.

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