Editorial: Legislature offered ways to shore up records act

The Washington Coalition for Open Government has announced an ambitious agenda for this legislative session. It would be less ambitious if lawmakers hadn’t steadily eroded the Public Records Act since it was overwhelmingly adopted by voters in 1972.

It’s always a struggle to get public officials to loosen the reins on information that could hold them accountable. This is especially true of lawmakers who have exempted many legislative records from the same law that forces municipal and county governments to divulge theirs. The conflict of interest is obvious. You’d think lawmakers would bend over backward to avoid this favoritism.

Not coincidentally, among the priorities of the WCOG is to end the legislative exemption, and to add “courts” to the definition of “agency,” so their administrative records would also be open to the public.

You might recall the 2010 election incident when judicial candidate Timothy Note requested the attendance record of his opponent, Spokane County District Court Judge Debra Hayes. That information was exempt from the Public Records Act. If Hayes were a county commissioner or city council member, it would not have been exempt. She voluntarily produced the information, and there wasn’t anything to hide. But what if there had been some wrongdoing? That’s why lawmakers need to end the exemption for courts and the Legislature.

Examples of other WCOG priorities that merit attention are:

• Mandatory training for public officials on open government principles and law. Many violations of the Public Records Act are caused by ignorance, not subterfuge. But ignorance can be costly when government is sued for public records violations.

• Restore the original intent of the attorney-client privilege exemption. A court ruling expanded this to cover mere speculation that legal action could arise from sought-after information. The change would raise the bar to an actual or threatened lawsuit.

• Protect funding for superior and appellate courts. A diminished capacity to quickly resolve public records disputes increases the likelihood that the information will become moot by the time cases are resolved.

• Protect funding for state archives. The public can’t access information if it isn’t preserved in the first place. Due to recent budget cuts, the five state archives have gone from 80 workers to 50. Further proposed cuts would drop employee numbers to fewer than 30. In addition, $4 million in archive funding was shifted to the general fund.

• Treat electronic records the same as public records when it comes to retaining and handling them.

• Provide an exemption to audio recordings of executive sessions for entities that want to voluntarily record them. Ultimately, the goal is to mandate the recording of executive sessions, but this step would demonstrate to nervous public officials the value in having this record to resolve internal disputes.

Those are just some of the requests. There are more, and they all would increase transparency and accountability. Plus, they would help restore the voters’ intentions before the lawmakers adopted hundreds of exemptions.