The Daytona Beach News-Journal

Keeping Florida fully in the ‘sunshine’

Legislators should concentrate on expansion, not exemptions

Sunday, March 16 editorial

Florida’s open-meeting and open-record laws are windows that reveal how well or how poorly government runs. Some want the windows shut for fear the public will find out too much. Some want them opened wider. Too often, the windows are shut.

Since Florida pioneered open-meetings laws in 1967 and Florida voters approved the constitution’s public-records and open-meetings amendment in 1992, legislators have created more than 1,000 exemptions. A few, like those protecting minors’ privacy or those creating safeguards against identity theft, are necessary. Many are not. This year’s crop of proposed exemptions and expansions continues the trend. Some should be championed. Many should be strongly resisted.

First, the good. A proposal by Rep. Gayle Harrell, R-Port St. Lucie, would require state agencies to maintain free Web sites documenting quarterly all state government contracts and expenditures valued at $5,000 or more. The site would include the agency spending the money, the name of the person or business receiving the money and the purpose of the expenditure. The proposal also calls for the governor’s office to provide a Web portal with links to all those sites.

It’s an effective, overdue way of giving taxpayers an almost unfiltered look at how the state spends their money. The bill doesn’t call for local governments to follow suit. But it’s a good guide for them to follow — and implement, even absent a state mandate.

A proposal by Rep. Dorothy Hukill, R-Port Orange, requiring that all local governments give citizens a reasonable opportunity to speak at public meetings and workshops — whether on agenda items or not — is also a necessary safeguard for public input. Local governments shouldn’t use agenda rules of their own making to squelch the voices of the people they’re elected to serve.

On the negative side, one proposal — by Rep. Perry Thurston Jr., D-Fort Lauderdale — is striking for its onerous breadth. It would create a public record exemption for any portion of a record that contains an individual’s personal identification information. The proposal is designed to prevent identity theft. The expressed motive is commendable. The actual proposal isn’t.

It would potentially close vast swaths of documents merely on the excuse that they contain information that could be deemed personal, even when it’s been collected legally (a Social Security number is considered redactable. But is an address? A name? A birth date?). It would also create an administrative nightmare because every state and local agency would have to review all documents for compliance. It’s already a crime to misuse personal information in identity theft cases. Thurston’s overly broad proposal would clamp down on the release of public documents.

Exemptions are supposed to be specific and justified. Many proposed this year are neither. They include:

• A plan to exempt from public release (in two separate bills) the addresses and phone numbers of all judicial personnel (judges are exempt already), paramedics and emergency service technicians.
• A broad exemption for all meetings and records of the Florida Alternative Energy Center when any confidential information (about a prospective donor, for example) may be discussed.
• An exemption from public release of private security camera recordings that have been turned over to police. (An exemption is already in place for such recordings that are part of an ongoing investigation, but not once the investigation is closed.)
• An exemption from public release of any portion of a domestic violence injunction, including those referring to the perpetrator, until the injunction has been served.

After eight years of government in the shadows under his predecessor, Gov. Charlie Crist made open government a priority. He established a special Office of Open Government. He immediately directed state agencies to make their compliance with open-requests a priority. Commendably, every state agency now has a point person responsible for answering to the public on open government matters while ensuring that the agency the person represents is doing all it can to be in compliance.

There are challenges. The state’s electronic records, which should have made public access easier, are hit and miss when it comes to making them available to the public. There is no single electronic system defining what is and what isn’t public across agencies. Expensive though it is, that should be corrected. Overall, however, the state is on the right path. It’s up to legislators to follow and widen that path — not obstruct it or devise new and unnecessary exemptions.

Tuesday, March 11 editorial

Budget secrets

Inject openness into Florida’s fiscal process

The Florida Constitution requires only two duties of the state Legislature: Produce an annual, balanced budget. And conduct business openly.

Unfortunately, those two charges sometimes come into direct conflict, especially when budget negotiations get down to the wire. As the state House and Senate prepare to “conference” on more than $500 million in cuts to the current year’s spending plan, even legislators are complaining that they’re not sure what the plan, rushed through legislative committees on its way to the floor, contains. And if lawmakers can’t keep up, what hope do members of the general public have?

“You figured out how to cut this pie in secret,” growled House Minority Leader Dan Gelber, a Democrat, last Wednesday, at the start of floor debate over the House’s version of cuts. State Rep. Shelley Vana, D-West Palm Beach, said she requested explanations of some of the proposed cuts and received only bare line-item listings.

The Senate’s deliberations over the same reductions were slightly less testy Thursday — but outside observers noted that the House and Senate budget-cut plans are remarkably similar, suggesting secret negotiations among Republican majority leaders.

Legislators have much bigger cuts in their future. Unless they vote themselves more time, legislators must finalize next year’s budget over the next eight weeks. And they face a revenue shortfall of roughly $2.5 billion. The decisions will be difficult and painful. They should not be hidden from the Floridians who pay the bills and who will feel the eventual brunt of the cuts.

Editorial, Tuesday, March 11

Bills on dark path to lighted floor

When a Florida lawmaker files a bill, the text — linked to the statutes it would change, and eventually, a professional staff analysis of the bill’s potential impacts — shows up on the Legislature’s Web site. People watching for developments on a particular topic can track those bills through subject-word searches or a lawmaker’s Web page, and there’s a deadline (which passed a week ago) for submitting new proposals. It’s all very open and transparent.

With the Florida Legislature, however, there’s always a “but” involved. Increasingly, legislative leaders are shuffling wide-ranging and complex legislation onto their agendas without going through those preliminaries. These so-called “proposed committee bills” or PCBs (the acronym does double duty in the House, where most PCBs are actually produced by councils) can spring into being seemingly overnight, giving members of the public little time to react and almost no time to put their objections on the record.

Consider Tuesday’s agenda for the House Committee on 21st Century Competitiveness, which reads: “Consideration of Language for a Proposed Council Bill relating to Class Size Reduction Implementation Flexibility.”

By any measure, that’s a big issue: Voters mandated smaller class sizes in public schools in November 2002 and left lawmakers little wiggle room in implementing their wishes. There’s no indication of what the “flexibility” eventual legislation might contain, or whether it will hew to voters’ wishes for smaller class sizes. Education leaders around the state (and members of the public) are left guessing what lawmakers have in mind and wondering whether they should make the drive to Tallahassee immediately so they can testify at the hearing scheduled to start at 10 a.m.

By the time the actual language emerges, the bill might be just a few days away from its final public hearing before heading to the floor. For many around the state, the notice is simply too short. They can still lobby lawmakers, but the opportunity to speak in an open committee hearing will have passed.

Absolving lawmakers of any bad intention, there’s still an inherent problem with a process so rushed and secretive. If legislative leaders want to allow bills to be drafted and filed by committees, that proposed legislation should follow the same path as other bills — with the same opportunities for public input and questioning.

Editorial, Tuesday, March 11

Sham with shell bills

How state legislators hide their lawmaking

The Florida House and Senate each have nice flow charts on their Web site describing “how an idea becomes a law.” The Senate’s version even has little pictures to illustrate how a legislator or citizen starts the process by suggesting legislation, how a senator decides to introduce the idea as a bill, how it goes to the legislative drafting service that either writes the bill or reviews it for style, how the bill gets its number, its first reading, and so on down the line of committee hearings and votes and conferences with its House version.

Democracy in action. It’s a process to be proud of. If only it were so.

What the chart doesn’t show you is how legislators subvert the process. Their methods abound. One such chronic method is the filing of “shell” bills. Legislators are required to file a bill by a certain date for it to be considered during the legislative session. It gives people a chance to know what their legislators are up to. Legislators often don’t want people to know what they’re up to; otherwise they couldn’t pass many laws that favor the few and the powerful. So they file shell bills — bills that have a number and a vague title, but no substantial wording. You’ve heard of baseball deals involving players to be named later. This is the legislative equivalent: wording to be specified later.

Take bills relating to open government. At least 14 shell bills by House and Senate members have been introduced. Right now they’re not even one-page bills. They’re a two-and-a-half-line draft that says they aim to “create an exemption from public records and public meetings requirements.” One senator, Al Lawson, D-Tallahassee, filed five such bills. He chairs the governmental operations committee. These placeholder bills can be filled in like favors to one group or another. They’re a form of patronage. They can be slipped through the legislative process often without people being aware, as tracking shell bills is difficult.

Shell bills aren’t by definition wicked. Legislators’ motive defines that. But they are, by nature, stealthy. They’re an allowable end-run around the rules that defeats the purpose of informed citizen involvement. They’re a convenience to legislators, not a service to citizens. At worst, they facilitate patronage and deception. At best, they give one legislator a chance to outmaneuver another legislator’s mischief at the last minute. But if it’s transparency and a well-informed public that legislators claim to serve, arguments in defense of shell bills are easily trumped for arguments to abolish them — or at least make them more readily transparent by posting them on the Web by legislator name and purpose in a category of their own, and with updates when their contents change.

Barring that, the flow chart about how an idea becomes a law needs a footnote: “Your legislators’ deceptive practices not included.”

Reproduced courtesy of the Daytona Beach News-Journal.
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