Editorial: Public, butt out

Let's say you're a small-business owner who wants to find out how often your state Assembly representative corresponds with trucking industry lobbyists.

Or maybe you want to know whether the state has paid public money to settle sexual harassment complaints filed against your state senator.

You might think it would be a simple matter to figure such things out. If so, you'd be wrong.

Nothing is simple when it comes to public information and the California Legislature. As reporter John Hill outlines in a story in today's paper, California lawmakers have exempted themselves from many provisions of the state's open records act. The same rules that apply to other parts of state government and other elected officials just don't apply to our Legislature and legislators. Instead, lawmakers work under the Legislative Open Records Act, a law that apparently was named by someone with a grotesque sense of humor.

As Hill recounts in his news story today, the rules the Legislature has set for itself with the Legislative Open Records Act can produce some pretty outrageous results. For example, the public can't get access to records of complaints about the Legislature or its staff that are investigated by the Legislature. That has allowed lawmakers to hide such embarrassing details as the identities of male lawmakers accused of sexually harassing female staff members – even when those claims have led to six-figure settlements with the accusers.

California isn't the only state where a penchant for secrecy seems ingrained in legislative DNA. One notable example: In Texas, it took a 2007 ballot initiative to force lawmakers to begin recording their votes on specific bills.

Things in California aren't that bad – or are they? In 2006, TakeBackCA.org (a political watchdog group in Berkeley that is now known as MAPLight) asked the Legislature for a database of its votes. With the database, it would be relatively easy to track how one senator or Assembly member voted on, say, all bills relating to insurance. Without it, tracking such information is much more complicated and time consuming.

The Office of Legislative Counsel responded with a masterpiece of legalese, but it boiled down to this: The law doesn't prohibit us from giving you the database, but it doesn't require us to, either. So you're out of luck.

Why do lawmakers think they can live by a different set of rules than the ones they set for other elected officials? The obvious answer is that they can do what they want because they make the rules. A better question is this: How long will the state's voters tolerate legislators setting themselves up as a class apart, free to conduct the people's business beyond the view of the people?