January 15, 2007

Sen. Ramsey, Open the Door

The Monday Tennessean reports on how Tennessee's longtime legislative leaders deliberately made it very difficult for the people of Tennessee to track how their lawmakers vote on various pieces of legislation.

***UPDATED AT END OF POST***

While Tennessee lawmakers can click a button to find out how their colleagues vote on bills, their constituents face a 10-step online process to get the same result - and some say that's too cumbersome to be useful. ...Getting to the information you want - weeding out the extraneous information and zeroing in on what the user wants to know - is more difficult in Tennessee than in many other states such as Louisiana and Minnesota, where a vote record is just a few mouse clicks away.

The Tennessee House and Senate publish weekly, chronological accounts of what happened on their chamber floors, documents akin to meeting minutes. Those are posted on the legislature's Web site. But for a layperson trying to find out how their House member or senator voted on a certain bill or issue requires reading the right edition of the journal - and to do that, the user must first know the bill number and the date it was discussed.

They track current legislation through an internal computer program that lets them look up floor votes with a click of a button. They can also keep tabs on a bill's progress through Capitol Hill by bill number, or the area of Tennessee law it will affect, and compile reports on key bills.

As for what information does and does not appear on the public's computer screens at home, that decision is made by the speakers of the respective chambers of the legislature. In the House, that's Speaker Jimmy Naifeh; in the Senate, longtime speaker and Lt. Gov. John Wilder was deposed from his seat last week and replaced with Republican rival Ron Ramsey.

By making the records extremely difficult to find, the legislative leadership effectively refuses the right of many less technologically-savvy citizens to inspect them.

The Tennessee Coalition for Open Government says the state law means that, "in summary, documents that come into possession of a governmental agency either by virtue of receipt of the documents by the agency, or creation of the documents by the agency, are public records that must be made available for public inspection unless they are exempt from the disclosure by state law." Further, says TCOG, "the Act expressly states that it 'shall be broadly construed so as to give the fullest possible public access to public records."

The "internal" legislative database for Tennessee lawmakers is maintained by a government agency - the state's information technology department. Yet far from giving the public the "fullest possible access," rules established by Naifeh and Wilder deliberately limit access to those records.

I wonder if an open records lawsuit filed by a coalition of media, bloggers, and good-government groups like TCOG, Common Cause of Tennessee and the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, might force the legislative leadership to give the public access to the same legislative database that lawmakers access. It is, after all, a collection of electronic documents maintained by a government agency and as far as I can tell there is no state law that exempts its contents from the open-records law.

Lt. Gov. Ramsey, you want to be a hero? Direct the Senate Clerk and the IT folks to make the "internal" database open to the public.

UPDATE: Blogging state Rep. Stacey Campfield says that the legislative database that legislators have access isn't as useful as it used to be even to legislators, thanks to Speaker Naifeh:

The only bad thing about the DB the legislators use is that we can not check what other legislators do, only our own bills. Naifeh stopped cross access the year I came in. I don't think vote records are on there either I think it just says "Passed" or "Failed" not who voted how. If we had cross legislator reference, topic reference as well as vote records it would be great.

Meanwhile, a question: Is there any law or regulation that bars a member of the Tennessee legislature from giving a private citizen access to the internal legislative database?