Closing the books
State used to have a strong open records law, but now it’s nothing to brag about.
Let us tell you a story about a guy named Bob.
Bob was a friendly chemical salesman with a broad smile and a great sense of humor, but he occasionally got downright mad about the way the government spent his tax money. When he read in his morning newspaper that Houston’s city government had decided to start funding a business booster group, he figured he had a right to know where the money was going. So Bob filed a series of public information requests, amassed notebooks full of documents and took what he found to the offices of the Houston Business Journal, which then published an eye-opening account of how the Houston Economic Development Council was spending taxpayer dollars.
That’s the way open government should work. But that happened in 1986. Today, nobody can do what Bob did, because his citizen journalism depended on getting his hands on documents that are now kept secret. And unfortunately, a bill that would’ve once again made those records public is one of the pieces of open government legislation that died in this year’s session of the Texas Legislature.
For a generation, Texas boasted one of the strongest open records laws in the nation. After the Sharpstown banking and bribery scandal of the early 1970s, a reform-minded class of state lawmakers adopted the Public Information Act of 1973, which clearly said the public’s right to know what’s happening in our government should in most cases prevail over all other interests. Only with access to government information can voters keep government officials accountable.
But the Texas Supreme Court ignored that idea and overturned decades of precedent in 2015 when it ruled on two public information cases involving Boeing and the Greater Houston Partnership. In the Boeing case, the court decided that governments can refuse to show taxpayers copies of contracts covering transactions with private businesses; so now, if you think a politician sitting on the community college board has been doing shady deals with contractors, the documents showing details of those agreements can be kept secret. In the GHP case, the court ruled that nonprofit groups collecting taxpayer money to perform jobs usually done by government don’t have to open their books to public inspection; so now, for all we know, executives at these groups could be spending our money buying booze and expensive dinners for their friends and relatives.
Governments are outsourcing more and more of their responsibilities to these nonprofit entities, shielding their work from direct public scrutiny. So it’s troubling that legislation that would have opened these entities’ books to public inspection failed to pass in this year’s regular session.
Meanwhile, a couple of lesser-noticed open records bills also fell by the wayside. One of them would’ve closed a loophole that has allowed government officials to basically hide public information by keeping it on their personal computers, a sneaky trick exposed by an El Paso lawyer investigating the political and business deals behind the construction of a downtown baseball stadium. Another bill would have made sure that birth dates on public documents are public information, a technicality that’s important to reporters and other researchers because it helps them identify and distinguish between people who share the same name.
By the way, that friendly salesman we mentioned later turned his talents to professional journalism. His name was Bob Sablatura, and he ultimately became an investigative reporter for this newspaper. In his memory, we hope our state lawmakers won’t give up, and try again to pass these open government bills in the next session of the Texas Legislature.
After the Sharpstown banking and bribery scandal of the early 1970s, a reformminded class of state lawmakers adopted the Public Information Act of 1973, which clearly said the public’s right to know what’s happening in our government should in most cases prevail over all other interests.