AUGUSTA, GA - I asked CH2M Hill for some documents that I considered public records.

CH2M Hill has a multimillion-dollar engineering contract with Augusta to run the city’s sewage plants. Some people, such as Holly Manheimer of the Georgia First Amendment Foundation, find it troubling that a private entity hired to handle a public operation, such as running the public wastewater treatment, should be able to escape public scrutiny.

Nonprofits that receive more than a third of their funds from taxpayers are forced to comply with open records law. Why should a private company that lives off the public dollar keep its operations behind a dark curtain?

But CH2M Hill maintains that it’s not subject to open records requests. And it refused to answer my direct questions.

I made a similar request to the city. While the city produced some correspondence with CH2M Hill, with regard to most of my request, it said simply that it didn’t have any such documents.

That leads me to the conclusion that we have created a system in which it’s all too easy for ethical and legal violations to be hidden from the eyes of the public.

That’s not to say CH2M Hill did anything wrong. But when the company’s answer is “no comment” when you ask a direct question whether someone in the company provided items of significant value to members of the commission, it’s troubling.

CH2M Hill recently terminated one of its employees. That employee was required by contract with the city to be employed by CH2M Hill. That employee was apparently very important to some commissioners.

When commissioners were told the employee was facing termination in 2007, some threatened CH2M Hill with breach of contract and tried to put an end to the relationship.

When that same employee got what he called a “disappointing” performance evaluation in 2008, he came to the commissioners and some again threatened CH2M Hill with breach of contract.

In 2009, CH2M Hill fired that employee. That action nearly blew up CH2M Hill’s contract. A commission committee went into repeated secret sessions to discuss it. A proposal to study bringing the sewer plant back under public management resulted, and was narrowly defeated (with five of 10 members voting yes) by the full commission.

To me, it seems that when a public agency forces a private contractor to hire a certain employee — then steps up not once but three times to try to defend that employee from discipline — that employee is more public than private. Yet no one involved is willing to address the facts of the situation.

It’s as though “privatize” means “hide.” And it stinks like a sewer.