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| There's an old idea in Washington politics that a "Cascade Curtain" divides east from west. This blog tackles the political issues that matter to Eastern Washingtonians, from Congress on down to your local irrigation district. Join the conversation by commenting or e-mailing Herald political reporter Michelle Dupler at mdupler@tricityherald.com |
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closeTuesday, Sep. 01, 2009
Committee tells Legislature: "Open your records"
By Michelle Dupler, Herald staff writer
Jason Mercier of the Washington Policy Center reported in his blog on Monday that the state's Sunshine Committee voted 8-1 to repeal the Legislature's exemption to the public records act.
The exemption is actually a patchwork of sections in the Revised Code of Washington that functions to exclude some records of the Legislature things like e-mails and letters from disclosure unless the House or Senate designates them an official public record.
To put this into some context, I called my colleague Curt Woodward at the Associated Press in Olympia. He gave me an example from this past legislative session about trying to get copies of any polls lawmakers possessed about the budget or taxes the kind of thing the average citizen might want to know about while the state was facing a $9 billion deficit.
But the lawyers for the Legislature said, "Thats not a public record." Click on the PDF file to read the e-mail chain between Woodward and lawyer Tim Sekerak, who wouldn't even tell Woodward if any polling records existed.
While getting rid of this legislative loophole sounds like good news for proponents of open government, there's a rub the Legislature has to approve the committee's recommendation, which sounds like a classic case of putting the fox in charge of the hen house.
Considering it would have been the Legislature that created this patchwork exemption in the first place, one wonders if lawmakers can be trusted to strike it down, even with a near-unanimous recommendation from the committee. Any reasonably astute citizen should be able to see an inherent conflict of interest when lawmakers are asked to decide whether their own records should be public.
On the flip side, Herald Executive Editor Ken Robertson tells me when we were collecting records for former Herald reporter Chris Mulick's story last year on how Washington lost the Areva plant, some of the records we asked for included e-mails to lawmakers and we got them.
But it tends to be a prerequisite for journalists that we're inherently suspicious of authority, so I tend to be skeptical of someone who says, "Just trust me to do the right thing" without either a carrot or a stick in the picture, especially when that someone is a politician.
It also leaves the Legislature in the position that it can magnanimously grant requests when it feels like it, or withhold information when it feels like it say if the person asking is from an agency or group that doesn't support the people currently in power.
Your local city council or county commission doesn't have that power, by the way, and the double standard tends to irk them. I've heard several of our local elected officials say they'd like to see that double standard eliminated during my three years in the Tri-Cities.
But we'll just have to wait and see whether the Legislature decides its own records should be just as public as your city council's.
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