EDITORIALS
Open government updated
State Legislature takes good steps to make records transparent, accessible
Updated: 07/08/08 6:49 AM
The New York State law establishing the presumption that most government records are public has also presumed that most government records are paper.
It’s a statute that’s more than 30 years old, after all. How many of your favorite recipes and family photographs were on a hard drive or compact disc in 1974?
Government can be slow to catch up. But this year the New York Legislature found enough grease to improve portions of the state’s Freedom of Information Law and Open Meetings Law. Many of the changes recognize the fact that records are increasingly kept, copied and, most importantly, made available to the world with computer technology.
Among the bills that made it through the Legislature, and await a deserved signature from Gov. David A. Paterson, is one that provides that citizens seeking copies of public records are entitled to have them provided in formats other than paper. It sets a process to charge fees for such copies that cover the actual cost to the taxpayers rather than raise a barrier to access.
A related bill would instruct public agencies to set up their electronic records in such a way that public information can be easily separated from private data. That way, no agency will be able to claim that public information cannot be released without compromising someone’s privacy, and no agency will have to make such separations by hand, increasing cost and decreasing accuracy.
Also passed was a bill to require the state’s Committee on Open Government to assist public agencies in developing subject indexes of their public information. It then directs the agencies to post those lists on the Internet.
Other gains for open government that aren’t so electronic in nature include a measure that will make it easier for plaintiffs to recover their attorney’s fees if they successfully sue public bodies for violating the open meetings law, one to require documents that are to be discussed in open meetings to be made available to the public 72 hours before that meeting, or “as soon as practicable,” and one to make it clear that inventories of city, town and village property assessments are public record.
It’s not only the Legislature that is getting online. State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli has launched a Web site called Open Book New York. It offers searchable databases of spending by 113 state agencies and more than 60,000 state contracts. And Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo last December unveiled Project Sunlight, a Web site that provides information drawing connections among lawmakers, lobbyists and legislation.
On the local level, Orchard Park Supervisor Mary Travers Murphy has added to the town’s Web site a line-by-line list of the cost — in wages and, crucially, benefit costs — of each and every town employee (by position, not by name).
The bad news is that a bill to allow photo and video coverage of courtroom proceedings, and another to require all public bodies to allow audio-visual coverage of open meetings, failed. In an era when such coverage can be easy and unobtrusive, that’s a stunning shortcoming.
But the sunshine bills that did pass allow hope that those barriers to open government may soon fall, as well.
