State disclosure laws need to stay

The Indiana General Assembly is considering a bill that would exempt the group from the state's disclosure laws. Last week, the Senate Government and Regulatory Affairs Committee voted to endorse the legislation, which would limit public access to government records and personal communications between lawmakers and constituents. \nThe General Assembly needs to kill this bill quickly. \nThe purpose of the disclosure laws is so that the public and the media can keep track of what our representatives are doing while in office. If the power is given to the General Assembly to decide what to release to the public, the general public will hear only what the legislature wants us to hear -- and that might not be the whole story. If the General Assembly closes its doors and makes important decisions that could change the way the state government operates, the citizens of Indiana should have a right to know how those conclusions were met and the reasoning behind the conclusions. Shouldn't we have the right to know, for example, if the General Assembly voted every month in the last session to increase legislators' salaries?\nThe voters need to make an educated choice when voting for legislators. One way they do this is to look at the voting records of their representatives. If the General Assembly would decide that its voting records should not be a matter of public record, it would be harder for the public to make an adequate decision about how its representative is serving.\nThere are already restrictions on how the public can obtain this information from the General Assembly. Records and transcripts must be requested during normal business hours and the person requesting the records must have some "reasonable particularity" to the record in question; there might be a fee charged for a copy of the record; and there is no deadline for when the records must be delivered to a group. These provisions more than protect the General Assembly from disseminating their information to the public. \nThe public needs to know what is going on in its legislature, a public body that serves us. If this legislation passes the General Assembly, not only will the public have no way of knowing what the legislators are up to, it will lessen the credibility of the body as a whole. \nStaff vote: 7-0-1