Commentary:
In New Mexico, To Publish Some Public Records Remains a Crime
The New Mexico Press Association Web page demonstrates a profound deficiency of Web skills among the statewide industry group. (Click for more details.)
“We haven’t heard a peep,” from the Foundation for Open Government or New Mexico Press Association about his Sunshine Portal Transparency Act, Senator Sander Rue told me in a phone call during the early part of this year's legislative session.
The states’ freedom-of-the-press groups aren’t exactly asleep at the wheel, but they have let elected officials take the lead in some of the most important moves to establish open government in the 21st Century. I’m talking about New Mexico’s Public Records Act, which imposes criminal penalties for publishing public records online.
You read that right – criminal penalties, public records. That's what's on the law books in New Mexico - read NM 14-3-15.1.
Rue’ bill passed the Senate unanimously, as did bills last year to create a state Web portal to provide limited information about state spending. A similar bill earlier required the Secretary of State to provide campaign finance information online. None of the bills requires comprehensive access to electronic public records, even when records are deemed public by law and made available in limited form through new government-run "portals."
Hurray for Sunshine, no? No. I tried to get the elections data from the Secretary of State in a format that would be easily searchable for a digitally savvy data reporter such as myself. No such luck.
Staffers dragged their feet and obfuscated the nature of the data, even after I demanded a printed “entity relationship diagram” of the database under more enforceable rules that govern paper records in the state. That diagram showed me relationships between various tables in data that drives the election finance portal -- data a Secretary of State’s office IT employee told me “is not relational.”
Senator Rue listened attentively to my concerns that all the data behind the proposed “Sunshine” portal needs to be downloadable in its entirety. He seemed to understand the status of public administration and mass communication technology in our times. Elected officials often have not been briefed on changes in technology and rely on either press lobbyists or state IT staff -- and political appointees -- to steer policy.
Under the new Sunshine Data Portal plan, and the plans that have created state-sponsored limited access to a few minute portions of state records, the state will hire IT employees to design Web sites that tell the public how to search the limited data available.
With technology rapidly changing, most reporters lack the skills, and many media organizations lack the resources to analyze raw data the way they pore through reams paper documents. But reporters just as often throw away 90 percent of some documents public officials hand them – documents that are otherwise online to be downloaded as needed.
I asked Senator Rue to amend his bill to require full release of all data in the proposed portal, so I could create a non-government-sponsored data-analysis portal. That would provide jobs in the private sector and allow me to analyze data without a state employee looking over my shoulder, following my tracks through the state Web site, perhaps as I conduct pre-election research.
“We don’t want to create any issues that might cause heartburn with anybody.” Rue said.
He did invite me to meet with him after the session to strategize on ways to approach the NM14-3-15.1 that says state databases that contain public records need not be released in electronic format. The legislature in 2005 changed part that law to require counties to release all of their public database contents (see NM 14-3-18) – except for certain information stored in proprietary formats. But public records in state database remain shielded behind a law that provides criminal penalties for publishing public records.
Follow the Foundation for Open Government's legislative activity on the FOG Web site.
Santa Fe County has made tremendous strides toward transparency, well beyond the new requirements that they release electronic data on demand. While they still donate to daily newspapers two reams of printed paper twice a month detailing county commission briefings, they also now put those documents online for anybody to download and print without spending public money.
But in these austere times, Santa Fe County is facing potential staff cuts, including perhaps the job of the employee who puts those records on line. There was no discussion at a recent finance directors breifing to county commissioners of charging the major newspapers the usual 25-to-50-cents-a-page for the paper they receive twice a month at taxpayer expense. As government trims budgets, it is important that we the public step up to do our share of politely checking in to be sure government operates fairly and efficiently. In these times this means news organizations must learn new skills.
It also means we must work with public officials to be sure new approaches to providing public information don’t turn our jobs as reporters over to government information officers. Whenever any bill is in any legislative body concerning release of public records, always ask legislators to provide full online access to all of the data.
Pretty Web designs and fancy portals are nice, but if we can just get the data, downloadable through a simple blue-on-white link in a page as easy to read as a Google search-result page, responsible news organizations can and should be able to figure out what to do with complex data so the public can understand it. Isn’t that our job?
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