Some years ago, I was present at a Legislative Finance Committee meeting in Silver City. Legislative committees hold some meetings each year outside Santa Fe, to help make government more accessible to citizens around the state.<\/p>\n
Attending the meeting were committee staff plus the usual suspects, state officials and lobbyists.\u00a0 Following committees around the state was part of their job.\u00a0 They could have been back in Santa Fe for all the difference the location made. \u00a0Not a soul from the local community was in attendance, until a dozen or so senior citizens walked in, chaperoned by a staff member of their retirement home.<\/p>\n
The secretary of the Department of Finance and Administration was testifying.\u00a0 As is customary, he was facing the committee, had his back to the audience, and was \u00a0talking in technical language about technical matters.\u00a0 To these visitors, he could have been speaking Klingon. The committee chair never acknowledged the visitors, either, or changed procedure in any way to accommodate them. \u00a0\u00a0They sat in bewildered silence.<\/p>\n
Various state boards and commissions also tramp around the state with their professional followers in tow. Local residents have a chance to participate, or at least watch and say howdy, but rarely do.<\/p>\n
During the years when I was helping to drag the Workers’ Compensation Advisory Council to one out-of-town meeting per year (they used to do this, but haven\u2019t since the start of the Richardson administration), I mulled over the low community participation and thought it would be helpful if the Governor\u2019s office would publish a comprehensive statewide calendar of all such meetings, organized by date and city, to help citizens connect with events taking place in their own communities.\u00a0 So if you were free some Tuesday afternoon and a state commission or legislative committee was in your town, you could stroll over to watch your government in action.\u00a0 That was before online searchable data bases had become common.<\/p>\n
Things are now much more sophisticated.\u00a0 The same open government fanatics who developed a searchable data base of state employee salaries (see a recent column of mine) surely are capable of creating such a data base of government meetings \u2013 all boards, commissions, and committees, both executive and legislative.<\/p>\n
To the credit of the Governor\u2019s office, a beginning has been made, however modest and ineffective at this point.\u00a0 At the newmexico.gov <\/span>web site, click on \u201cgovernment,\u201d then \u201copen meetings\u201d for a very short list of upcoming meetings around the state.\u00a0 Only a few state boards are listed. \u00a0The Legislative Council Services publishes a list of upcoming interim committee meetings on its website at nmlegis.gov<\/span>.<\/p>\n Perhaps it\u2019s time to update the Open Meetings Law, which predates the Internet era, to make public notice in a centralized Internet location mandatory, and to require that the notice say something about the topics to be covered.\u00a0 Current law requires the agenda to be \u201cavailable to the public\u201d 24 hours in advance, but it doesn\u2019t say what constitutes availability nor does it define \u201cagenda.\u201d Some staffers know how to write minimalist agendas that reveal as little as possible (I\u2019ve done it). \u00a0While it\u2019s completely reasonable for agendas to be completed at the last minute, the public should be able to have a general idea of what\u2019s going to be discussed several days in advance.<\/p>\n That, in this writer\u2019s opinion, would measurably benefit the spirit of open government.<\/p>\n Triple Spaced Again, \u00a9 New Mexico News Services 2012<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Some years ago, I was present at a Legislative Finance Committee meeting in Silver City. Legislative committees hold some meetings each year outside Santa Fe, to help make government more accessible to citizens around the state. Attending the meeting were … Continue reading