Our hope is that state lawmakers in their actions will always set an example for how elected representatives on all levels throughout the state go about their work, particularly that they will always hold to the highest standard of openness and transparency.
And we are so often disappointed, our hope dashed on the rocks of specialist-interest influence and campaign contributions.
The Super Majority in the Indiana House of Representatives has set for itself a new definition of a “work product” in order to avoid exposing its members to possible embarrassing collusion with energy and utility companies over a solar-power bill during this year's session of the General Assembly.
“Work product” is basically documented communications between lawmakers, their staffs, lobbyists, state offices, constituents — just about any communication involving a lawmaker and his or her work in the Legislature — communications that have, at least until this year, generally been considered public record and available upon request.
The one statutory exception, as set out in the Indiana Access to Public Records Act, are communications between lawmakers and “partisan staffs,” that is, political operatives, an exemption that complements the statutory exemption for a political caucus from the stipulations of the Indiana Open Door Law.
Earlier this year the Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana and the Energy and Policy Institute filed an open records request seeking correspondence between state Rep. Eric Koch, a Bedford Republican who chairs the Energy, Utilities and Telecommunications Committee (and who serves on the House ethics committee), and various utilities regarding a bill about solar power.
The Super Majority in power denied the request, asserting that the General Assembly doesn't have to abide by state laws governing public access, an argument the Hoosier State Press Association, among others, called nonsense.
Once the session adjourned and media oversight of lawmakers' doings dimmed, the Super Majority in power came up with a new definition of work product that basically would hide any and all of their communications from the public — going to such an extent that, as Steve Key with HSPA said, that an “email about lunch would be work product.”
“They are trying to define everything they do as work product which is very unfortunate,” Key said.
Our words would have been much stronger than “very unfortunate” to describe this kind of chicanery.
This isn't the first time lawmakers have tried to exempt themselves from public access laws; in 2001, they passed a bipartisan bill stating the General Assembly was not covered by the Access to Public Records Act.
The late Gov. Frank O'Bannon, a newspaperman at heart, vetoed the legislation.
A year later, again with bipartisan support, there was an effort to exclude lawmaker emails from public access, a proposal that was shot down thanks in no small part to the work of The Sun-Commercial and other newspapers.
It just seems to us that if a law has been on the books for more than 30 years, its intent to provide Hoosiers with “broad and easy access” to public documents so they can “more fully participate in the governmental process,” then the General Assembly, the highest-level governing body in the state, should most-closely abide by it — should in fact set the standard for adhering to the law's requirements, it's members exemplary in their dedication to the spirit of the law.
Alas, that is not the case.
For by being faithful to laws calling for the greatest possible openness and transparency they would expose for public inspection just how dirty and degraded state government has become.
State lawmakers these days would rather pursue their current course and set the example for local governments that less openness is better, less transparency more desirable, promoting along the way as their particular brand of civics the virtues of corruption.
Quite the lesson as we head into Indiana's bicentennial year.