Saturday, February 28, 2009

"Roundhouse mystery"

Journal reporter Jeff Jones spins quite a tale; link.




House Majority Leader W. Ken Martinez, D-Grants,

introduced a bill that would have shortened the time that state
agencies could take to comply with public records requests;
from 15 days down to 10.



The bill also settled the question of whether or not emails and
faxes were acceptable means of submitting requests.
Incredibly, there is a record of public servants refusing
to accept public records requests if the requests were emailed
or faxed to them.

The original bill was replaced by another, by a process
which was not made clear in the Journal report.

An allegagator tells me that Martinez had grown tired of a discussion and said something like; OK, you write something then.

So "they" did. "They" wrote a substitute bill that would
effectively gut the Inspection of Public Records Act.


According to the Journal,
Kip Purcell of the Foundation for Open Government
said;

"The bill would almost define 'public records' out of existence,"
"In short, it would be a disaster for the cause of open and honest government."
And no one seems to know, or will admit,
whose bright idea it was;
to put an end to public records access.



If this does not build a case for transparent government,
what does?




photo Mark Bralley

No comments: