Defending Our Public And Private Interests

Feel like contributing your time and talents to the community by joining other volunteers serving on local boards and commissions? Welcome! We’ve been waiting for you. Have a seat so we can get started on our review of your tax returns and credit reports. Did you bring along the kids’ savings passbooks? And how are those mortgage payments coming?…

This weird welcome to the world of community service may be in our future if a bill recently hatched in the legislature’s Government Administration and Elections Committee ever becomes law. The legislative proposal would require all local elected and appointed officials to submit an affidavit to be kept in public files listing all their financial interests, assets and debts, and those of their spouses and children. Quite naturally, local officials are protesting the prospect of this rather rude financial frisking, saying that it is an invasion of what little private life they have left after staying out late night after night at local meetings. And they are right.

Many of these same officials are also unhappy about a draft ruling currently before the state’s Freedom of Information Commission that declares email and voice mail records related to public business as public records subject to the state’s open meetings and records law. Email and voice mail are fast becoming the modes of choice for quick communication between colleagues on local boards and commissions and in municipal offices. Public officials opposed to the draft ruling argue that the difficulty imposed on them in keeping the vast quantities of these records organized and available to the public would outweigh the public interest in having access to them. And they are wrong.

We sympathize with the countless volunteer citizens who are trying to contribute to their communities by serving in unpaid positions in municipal government. These days it seems that public service only makes headlines when the public is betrayed. Our collective mood in the face of these betrayals is not to give our leaders a hand but to give them handcuffs. This explains the legislative zeal to vet the finances of our elected and appointed leaders. Our volunteer town leaders deserve our appreciation, not our suspicion and resentment. Why should we make them bare their financial souls? Clearly the proposed legislation ventures too far into the conduct of the private lives of those citizens we need most to make our governments more representative and responsible.

In the conduct of the public’s business, however, privacy is reserved for a very short list of exceptions to the state’s Freedom of Information Act: medical records, criminal investigative materials, test questions, trade secrets, strategic information in pending litigation and collective bargaining, adoption records, and similar records that would compromise personal privacy or jeopardize public safety. Everything else is supposed to be public, including the kind of policy discussions, directives, and background information that routinely move in and out of email boxes and voice mail systems of public officials. This kind of information is useful to citizens who want to better understand what their government is up to. Simply because this information may be hard to organize or maintain is not sufficient reason to remove it permanently from public view. An open government should not be contingent on the relative ease of record keeping. Maintaining a hidden channel for communication, even in the benign cause of expediency, will provide a tempting haven for abuse by those interested in skirting the Freedom of Information Act.

Having privacy invade open government is just as much a threat to our freedom and liberty as having government invade our personal privacy. We should defend our system of transparency and accountability in government as vigorously as we would defend our homes.