Regarding Thursday’s editorial about pink slime, an alert reader pointed out an interesting fact that we missed.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture official who approved the use of this slime, or “finely textured lean beef,” commonly added to ground beef over the objection of USDA scientists was then-Undersecretary of Agriculture Joann Smith.

Her decision produced hundreds of millions of dollars for Beef Products Inc., the company that produces “slime.”

When Smith left the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1993, she was appointed to the board of directors for BPI’s principal major supplier, where she reportedly made at least $1.2 million over the next 17 years, according to ABC News.

That’s pretty slimy.

The USDA said that, while Smith’s appointment was legal at the time, she could not have immediately joined the board under current ethics rules.

Not immediately? How about not at all?

Learn more: http://tinyurl.com/6tqevgx

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Cheers to the Maine House of Representatives for Thursday’s vote to kill LD 1805, a bill supported by Gov. Paul LePage — and practically no one else — that would have shielded the governor’s working papers from the public during each and every legislative session.

The vote was 98-47, with five representatives abstaining.

Hard to believe anyone could have abstained from this one. Either a person believes the governor’s papers should be public or believes they should not. Having a non-opinion on government transparency is meek.

This was a bad bill from the start.

It began in July 2011 with a letter from LePage to the Right to Know Advisory Committee expressing discomfort with a Freedom of Access Act request for all grocery receipts from the Blaine House. He argued that making public the “intimate details” of the first family’s diet goes far beyond spending funds “and into the private details of my family’s life.”

There are no private details when it comes to public spending.

His second concern was that he believed “certain people” were using Maine’s FOAA to file “incredibly broad requests” for documents “simply to gum up the works of my office and prevent us from moving initiatives forward.”

Worse, according to the governor, “none of the information has actually been made public by the requestor.” But that’s not a requirement of FOAA. Requestors can, and often do, request access to records simply to glean information for themselves.

We appreciate that broad FOAA requests — and we’ve made a few — can consume a tremendous amount of valuable staff time. Fortunately, this particular governor and his staff have been exceptionally responsive in acknowledging and fulfilling these requests. That’s something we can’t say for previous administrations.

But, that LePage’s two concerns steadily morphed into a proposal for an outrageously broad exception to all of the governor’s working papers (which would not include grocery receipts, by the way) was just plain bad policy.

In that July letter, LePage opened with a statement that he believes “an open government is an honest government.”

We’re relieved, after months of discussion about shielding documents, that the sentiment of an open, honest government won the day.

Now, if only lawmakers would vote to remove the shield from their own working papers, Mainers could proudly say we truly have transparency in government.

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The opinions expressed in this column reflect the views of the ownership and editorial board.