Public has right to know what lawmakers do

Why should the state body that enacts laws be exempt from laws granting greater public scrutiny? Massachusetts, known for its restrictive, archaic public-records laws, finally passed reform legislation in 2016, the first update to those statutes in nearly 40 years. However, those improvements to public access pertained only to the workings of municipal government. They didn’t address the long-standing exception enjoyed by the Legislature, governor and judiciary. And when it comes to accessing the dealings of its lawmakers, Massachusetts remains squarely in the minority. Legislatures in virtually every other state, including our New England neighbors, are subject to public-records laws. So, we were at least guardedly optimistic when the Legislature attempted to study ways to pry open the seal of privacy. The impetus for that step came out of that records-reform legislation. But instead of taking on the three-headed obstacle to the public’s right to know, lawmakers set up a commission of separate Senate and House panels to consider whether to expand the law to the Legislature, judiciary and governor’s office; these bodies supposedly set about examining and hopefully finding solutions for accessing these records. But in the end, neither one could reach consensus on potential legislation or new rules, and the commission disbanded without rendering any formal recommendations. “I was really disappointed we didn’t come to consensus,” Rep. Jennifer Benson of Lunenburg, who co-chaired the commission on the House side, told the State House News Service. “My staff and I and the House members, as well as all the members of the commission, really took this seriously, did a lot of work and research around this issue, and tried to understand every facet of not only the concept of public records, but exactly how we can make this more robust and accessible and transparent to the public and ways specifically to do that, and unfortunately we just did not agree on ways to do that.” Benson indicated the Legislature faces constraints contained in our state constitution against extending the open-records law to the governor’s office and judiciary. However, somehow the rest of our republic has managed to navigate those muddy legal waters. We realize it took four decades to attain any semblance of public-records reform, so we shouldn’t be surprised that lawmakers have reservations about opening the doors of their inner workings to public view. We’d hoped that revelations concerning the House speaker’s disclosure of that chamber’s use of nondisclosure and nondisparagement agreements without the knowledge of fellow lawmakers might move them to see the need to act, but even that slight apparently proved insufficient to change the insular culture on Beacon Hill. Despite these setbacks, we shouldn’t just sit back and allow the Legislature to conduct business as usual. Efforts to open up the dealings of the judiciary and governor’s office can be put on the back burner for now, but the news media should demand that lawmakers respond to the public’s right for greater access. And instead of forming a legislative group that looks inward, we propose following the same procedure as was done when investigating how other states implemented the rollout of recreational pot. There were only a few states from which to choose for that assignment. But legislators have the pick of just about every other state in the union to find ways to shine a stronger beacon of light on the State House.