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Friday, March 9, 2007
Time to raise the blinds
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
When he was a nobody under the Gold Dome, State Rep. Austin Scott (R-Tifton) discovered what Republicans as a minority had long experienced: Asking for information — and actually getting it — are entirely different.
Even as an elected official with access to Georgia’s attorney general, Scott found himself an outsider with no more success in getting public information from Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital in Albany and Tift Regional Medical Center in Tifton than might a high school student pursuing a class project.
Scott’s experiences are not unique. Legislators’ inability to get information to which they are legally entitled — and which, indeed, is essential to their role as the people’s elected representatives — is a persistent problem, even for those now in key budgeting and oversight positions.
If not for her persistence through the summer of 2005, state Rep. Jill Chambers (R-Atlanta) would have found her MARTA legislative oversight committee rendered largely ceremonial by the unwillingness or inability of MARTA officials to answer her questions about its budget.
Other legislators, too, including committee chairmen, complain bitterly that they are unable to get information to which they are legally entitled about salaries, benefits, accounts, program allocations and other expenditures of public money.
State Rep. Burke Day (R-Tybee Island), who is chairman of the committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security, distributed to House members in January a copy of a letter he had received from a department head. It came in response to a request for information on the salaries of rangers in the Department of Natural Resources. Wrote DNR Commissioner Noel Holcomb on Dec. 18:
“I am working closely with Governor’s office regarding pay and recruitment and retention for our law enforcement officers, and have already submitted DNR’s budget to the Board and they have approved it.
“Having just met recently with the Governor regarding DNR’s budget, I feel at this time that I am unable to respond to your request for information on the above subject.”
To which Day responded, just as any citizen denied a public record by an ornery counter clerk, “What!!?”
In his comments on the copy distributed to fellow House members, Day wrote: “House Study Committee [on State Law Enforcement Salaries and Benefits] DENIED access to the truth.” And, he wrote elsewhere on the letter from Holcomb: “This is one reason we need to pass Jill Chambers’ H.B. 91,” a bill that would require state departments and agencies to give the Legislature a yearly statement on revenues and spending, a list of contracts valued at more than $50,000, names of conractors and suppliers paid more than $20,000, a list of payments to employees, board members, consultants and other providers of professional services.
Given those experiences, it’s hard to imagine that the wandering souls who come in from the forest to the Big House would ever intentionally make it difficult for the rest of us to access public records or meetings. You can’t have faced an arbitrary denial of records and information — whether you’re an ordinary citizen, a member of an ignored minority in the Legislature or a legislator entrusted with a position of oversight power and responsibility— and not feel “What!!?”
The lesson should never be lost on this new majority under the Gold Dome. The accountable government that conservatives hope to create must also be a transparent government; openness and access are fundamental.
In a conversation recently with Joseph B. Doyle, who directs the Governor’s Office of Customer Service, we talked about a couple of ambitious efforts to make government more responsive. The conversation covered efforts to improve child support services, to give same-day service to a parent, usually the mother, who comes into a Department of Family and Children’s Services office trying to get the court to enforce child support payments. It’s a process that ordinarily takes four months. By handling it same day, as opposed to scheduling a return visit according to a specific caseworker’s availability, process time for enforcement in pilots is reduced to 30 days. The effort is expected to go statewide next month.
An effort aimed at reducing the time Georgians sit on hold when their calls pass through 27 call centers has achieved an average reduction of 3 minutes per call, saving callers 500,000 hours per year. What’s more, 600,000 more calls are being answered. It’s good news, certainly, but the real question is how to continue gaining efficiency and improving service when this governor goes away or attention is directed elsewhere.
Doyle’s response? Gather and report information on response times, dropped calls and misdirected calls and make that information easily available and therefore transparent. The best way to police government to determine whether efficiencies last is to empower Georgians with information. Otherwise, efficiencies are at risk of being flash-in-the-pan.
The same is true of education reforms that are being proposed, including school choice. It’s true, too, of the effort to help consumers become more responsible users and wiser purchasers of health care. The essence of all is to gather information, organize it and make it available — and then count on Georgians to use information to drive reform.
Republicans should never for a minute allow themselves to become a governing party that imposes or tolerates closed government. Information, and more importantly the access to it, is at the core of most everything conservatives want: Greater accountability, a smaller and more efficient government that enhances and promotes personal responsbility. Government in the sunshine should be a given.
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PeachCare, Iraq pullout, Bobby Brown
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s free-for-all Friday. Pick a topic:
• Nancy Pelosi Democrats have their surrender plan in place. Language to be added to a funding bill would require U.S. combat troops to skedaddle from Iraq by the fall of 2008 — or just in time to avoid any prospect that a Democratic president might actually have to manage a war.
• Bad news for PeachCare. Bailout funds are in the Iraq surrender bill. President Bush has to veto it. Get used to these games. Those who control Congress are determined to put one of their own in the White House.
• Memo to Lovejoy commuter rail backers: Amtrak’s Chicago-Washington train is on time 11 percent of the time. The late-show problem exists throughout the Amtrak system. The reason? Freight-hauling railroads own most lines and tracks are congested
• Clip-and-save headline from ajc.com: “More bad news for Bobby Brown.” He’s Whitney Houston’s bad news.
• Life without parole is the death penalty for jurors who don’t have the stomach for it. Die fast or die slow. Morally, there’s no difference.
• The state Senate has passed legislation increasing penalties for making, possessing or distributing fake IDs. It remains a misdemeanor for the under-21 crowd using fake IDs for booze, but for others the punishment is up to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $100,000. Here’s a bleeding-heart contest: How long will it take for the law to be declared “unjust” because some violator was two days past 21 or “didn’t know” the ID was fake? About a month after the bill’s signed, I’d say.
• Take and apply when and where you see fit: “We apologize.”
• First Prize in the contest to deprive terrorists of any weapon that might be used against us goes to … Georgia growers of the popular turfgrass SeaIsle Supreme. UGA proposes to license it to overseas growers. Georgia growers, who paid $25,000 for licenses, object. And for good reason too, as Soperton grower Phillip Jennings explains: “We have put too much money into it to allow countries friendly to terrorists to have this grass.” If those suckers get their hands on the Valencia peanut, we’re toast.
• A Russian journalist, Ivan Safronov, who planned to write about alleged Russian plans to sell weapons to Iran and Syria via Belarus “falls” to his death from a fifth-story window. His apartment is on the third. We live in a dream world, both as journalists and as Americans, largely unaffected by the evil that others elsewhere routinely confront. Our “bravery” is going to jail to protect a source; theirs is pursuing a story that could get them killed.
• President Bush should keep his veto pen handy. The Senate agrees to allow airport screeners to form unions. No union should exist in any agency with national security responsibilities.
• Bicycling’s a marvelous sport. But hand it to Roswell Mayor Jere Wood to demonstrate how to make a bicycle an alternative to a car for commuting purposes. He traveled 21 miles from City Hall to the Capitol Tuesday “with a police escort while someone else transported his suit,” according to the news account. Metro Atlanta mayors wanted to make a political statement. They did.
• But for the fact that I’m married and Georgia’s Constitution prohibits same-sex unions, the mega-millionaire lottery winner and “gone fishin’ ” truck driver Eddie Nabors would be awfully attractive, in the Anna Nicole Smith-billionaire J. Howard Marshall II sense. We wouldn’t actually have to live together. Or nothing. Just fish and spend.
• Two state House bills that attempt to address the use of red-light cameras to gin up revenue have promise. House Bill 77, as revised, would divert 75 percent of the revenue, after installation and maintenance costs, to a state trauma network and would require a traffic engineering study before they’re installed. Another, HB 590, would lower fines from $70 to $35. Pass both (if legislators are determined not to ban them altogether). No financial incentive should exist.
• Local governments throughout the state did a neighborly day’s work in sending crews and equipment to help tornado victims in Middle Georgia. DeKalb CEO Vernon Jones, for example, sent seven sanitation employees and equipment to help in Americus.
• Jim Wooten is the associate editorial page editor. His column appears Fridays, Sundays and Tuesdays.
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