SPRING 2007 NEWSLETTER

GEORGIA FOI ACCESS

GEORGIA FIRST AMENDMENT FOUNDATION

 SUNSHINE SUNDAY: OPEN GOVERNMENT IN GEORGIA

Time to raise the blinds

By Jim Wooten

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Atlanta, March 9, 2007 -- When he was a nobody under the Gold Dome, State Rep. Austin Scott (R-Tifton) discovered what Republicans as a minority had long experienced: Asking for information — and actually getting it — are entirely different.

Even as an elected official with access to Georgia’s attorney general, Scott found himself an outsider with no more success in getting public information from Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital in Albany and Tift Regional Medical Center in Tifton than might a high school student pursuing a class project.

Scott’s experiences are not unique. Legislators’ inability to get information to which they are legally entitled — and which, indeed, is essential to their role as the people’s elected representatives — is a persistent problem, even for those now in key budgeting and oversight positions.

If not for her persistence through the summer of 2005, state Rep. Jill Chambers (R-Atlanta) would have found her MARTA legislative oversight committee rendered largely ceremonial by the unwillingness or inability of MARTA officials to answer her questions about its budget.

Other legislators, too, including committee chairmen, complain bitterly that they are unable to get information to which they are legally entitled about salaries, benefits, accounts, program allocations and other expenditures of public money.

State Rep. Burke Day (R-Tybee Island), who is chairman of the committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security, distributed to House members in January a copy of a letter he had received from a department head. It came in response to a request for information on the salaries of rangers in the Department of Natural Resources. Wrote DNR Commissioner Noel Holcomb on Dec. 18:

“I am working closely with Governor’s office regarding pay and recruitment and retention for our law enforcement officers, and have already submitted DNR’s budget to the Board and they have approved it.

“Having just met recently with the Governor regarding DNR’s budget, I feel at this time that I am unable to respond to your request for information on the above subject.”

To which Day responded, just as any citizen denied a public record by an ornery counter clerk, “What!!?”

In his comments on the copy distributed to fellow House members, Day wrote: “House Study Committee [on State Law Enforcement Salaries and Benefits] DENIED access to the truth.” And, he wrote elsewhere on the letter from Holcomb: “This is one reason we need to pass Jill Chambers’ H.B. 91,” a bill that would require state departments and agencies to give the Legislature a yearly statement on revenues and spending, a list of contracts valued at more than $50,000, names of contractors and suppliers paid more than $20,000, a list of payments to employees, board members, consultants and other providers of professional services.

Given those experiences, it’s hard to imagine that the wandering souls who come in from the forest to the Big House would ever intentionally make it difficult for the rest of us to access public records or meetings. You can’t have faced an arbitrary denial of records and information — whether you’re an ordinary citizen, a member of an ignored minority in the Legislature or a legislator entrusted with a position of oversight power and responsibility— and not feel “What!!?”

The lesson should never be lost on this new majority under the Gold Dome. The accountable government that conservatives hope to create must also be a transparent government; openness and access are fundamental.

In a conversation recently with Joseph B. Doyle, who directs the Governor’s Office of Customer Service, we talked about a couple of ambitious efforts to make government more responsive. The conversation covered efforts to improve child support services, to give same-day service to a parent, usually the mother, who comes into a Department of Family and Children’s Services office trying to get the court to enforce child support payments. It’s a process that ordinarily takes four months. By handling it same day, as opposed to scheduling a return visit according to a specific caseworker’s availability, process time for enforcement in pilots is reduced to 30 days. The effort is expected to go statewide next month.

An effort aimed at reducing the time Georgians sit on hold when their calls pass through 27 call centers has achieved an average reduction of 3 minutes per call, saving callers 500,000 hours per year. What’s more, 600,000 more calls are being answered. It’s good news, certainly, but the real question is how to continue gaining efficiency and improving service when this governor goes away or attention is directed elsewhere.

Doyle’s response? Gather and report information on response times, dropped calls and misdirected calls and make that information easily available and therefore transparent. The best way to police government to determine whether efficiencies last is to empower Georgians with information. Otherwise, efficiencies are at risk of being flash-in-the-pan.

The same is true of education reforms that are being proposed, including school choice. It’s true, too, of the effort to help consumers become more responsible users and wiser purchasers of health care. The essence of all is to gather information, organize it and make it available — and then count on Georgians to use information to drive reform.

Republicans should never for a minute allow themselves to become a governing party that imposes or tolerates closed government. Information, and more importantly the access to it, is at the core of most everything conservatives want: Greater accountability, a smaller and more efficient government that enhances and promotes personal responsibility. Government in the sunshine should be a given.

Reprinted with permission from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 03/09/07.