Bill weakens publics right to know

Editorial

The Citizen

Friday, May 1, 2009

The law applies to everyone — except the lawmakers.

The people who enact laws can, if they choose, exempt themselves. They travel our highways at speeds that would earn we more common folk a summons to appear in court. While the rest of us are using E-ZPass or paying cash at the state’s toll booths, lawmakers pass through at no cost.

Now they want e-mail exchanges with constituents to be privileged information, an exception to the Right to Know law, a law so many people worked so hard to design and implement.

The history of Chapter 91-A of New Hampshire’s Revised Statutes Annotated has been a half-century struggle, two steps forward and one step back. Its beginnings were landed in the altogether logical beliefs and contentions that the people were the final governing authority, and for them to govern effectively, they must be exposed to and have access to the same information to which their elected representatives might be entitled.

There are exceptions to the Right to Know law crafted to protect the interests of the people. Among them is information pertaining to law enforcement investigations, the negotiation of contracts and the pursuit of decisions at law having an affect on the people and their interests.

The broad technological change that resonated through the late 20th century and into the 21st saw giant leaps in communication, not the least of which has been electronic mail transmission — e-mail.

The value of e-mail cannot be overstated. Where once the written word took days to get from sender to recipient, today it travels in seconds.

E-mail has become a useful tool in the execution of government. It is a supplement to traditional methods of exchange or the sometimes misunderstood implications or inferences in telephone conversation.

Transparency is the word that has been coined to describe the need to let the people look through government’s many windows and into its sometimes shadowy corners. Right to know is the term that still best applies. It clearly describes in three words the entire principle and its parts.

State lawmakers — the step they want to take is to exempt from disclosure e-mail communication between themselves and constituents.

The Senate’s committee on Election Law and Veterans Affairs met this week, but took no action on HB 349, which would write the exception into law. Earlier, the measure sailed through the House.

The substance of the bill is to allow lawmakers to decide which electronic communications from constituents would be subject to the Right to Know law. Those feathers you might soon see will be the ones caused by the fox entering the chicken coop.

Rep. Neal Kurk, R-Weare, had this to say about e-mail communication between lawmakers and constituents: “It’s not a public conversation, and it should not be a public record.”

One more barricade between lawmakers and the people as a whole.

The attitude in Concord is that information is dangerous — dangerous to the prevailing establishment.

There are people in the Legislature who are uncomfortable with codification of the public’s right to know. We are uncomfortable with it at times ourselves — when lawmakers try and sometimes succeed in building a wall between themselves and the people of New Hampshire.

It is as if a right to know applies only when they meet as a body while, even then, allowing them to decide what moment qualifies.

Public trust deserves something better.