2007 Open Government Legislative Roundup: Some successes and some failures
By Nick Rahaim
The 2007 legislative session started with a host of promising bills that would have created more transparency and would have reversed recent judicial and Attorney General opinions permitting excessive secrecy. There were some successes and some disappointments. The major disappointment was the failure to overturn the 2006 state Supreme Court decision in Copley Press v. Superior Court, which effectively sealed all police disciplinary records. The major success was legislation creating more oversight and accountability for the UC Regents’ and CSU Trustees’ executive pay committees.
Assemblyman Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) and Senator Gloria Romero (D-Santa Monica) introduced AB 1393 and SB 1019, respectively. These bills attempted to overturn the Copley Press decision that closed police disciplinary records to the pubic. With the police union’s full political weight against the bills, they never emerged from committee. The battle is not over, however. Both bills are likely to be considered again in the next legislative session.
Leland Yee (D-San Mateo) ushered SB 190, the Higher Education Governance Accountability Act, to Governor Schwarzenegger’s desk where it was signed into law on October 12. The bill applies to committees and sub-committees of the UC Regents and the CSU Trustees that decide on compensation of high-level university officials. The bill requires full disclosure of all salary proposals and allows for public comment before bringing a proposal to a final vote. In 2006 Yee authored a similar bill (AB 775), which was killed in the Senate Appropriations Committee by Don Perata (D-Oakland). Interestingly, Perata coauthored SB 190.
Another open government success was SB 690 by Senator Ron Calderon (D-Montebello). SB 690 allows district attorneys and local prosecutors to release police blotters and defendants’ “rap sheet” histories upon written request to those who will attest, under penalty of perjury, that the information will be used for a journalistic or scholarly purpose. The law overrides an opinion by former Attorney General Bill Lockyer, which had pulled blotters and rap sheets from the public record.
Governor Schwarzenegger also signed into law SB 39, authored by Carole Migden (D-San Francisco). The bill allows public access to information on children who die in the state’s care. Previously, records on children who died under the care of the state were kept confidential. SB 39 requires county welfare offices, in any case where there is reasonable suspicion of misconduct by the state, to release documents within five days of the death. The records can include medical records and records on abuse and mistreatment of the child under state care.
SB 343, introduced by Senator Gloria Negrete-McLeod, (D-Montclair) amends the Brown Act to require legislative bodies to make available staff analyses of meeting agenda items at the same time as the agenda is released. Prior to this legislation these records were only available through a Public Records Act request.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed AB 941, which would have closed off access to investigations of emergency medical technicians. The governor said of the bill, “…I am concerned that the bill would significantly limit public disclosure.”
For the second year in a row the Governor vetoed a bill that would have provided for a nonbinding administrative appeal in Public Records Act cases. AB 1393, authored by Mark Leno, arrived on Gov. Schwarzenegger’s desk significantly weakened, yet still unacceptable to the Governor. The vetoed bill would have required state agencies to create a Public Information Center on their websites, and would have convened an advisory task force to set standards for the posting of pubic documents. The original version of the bill also would have required the attorney general to review rejected CPRA requests and would have created fines for agencies that failed the comply with the CPRA.
AB 1668, the third open government bill authored by Leno, was held under submission in late May 2007. The bill would have required all state documents to be kept in an open document format. Open document formats allow text, spreadsheet, and presentation documents to be fully functional in a variety of applications, whereas documents for the current standard, Microsoft Office, are typically only fully functional in Microsoft Office. Advocates of the bill claimed it would reduce the costs of archiving electronic documents and would have improved access to public documents requested in an electronic format.