Every March brings Sunshine Week, an annual national effort that highlights the need for open government. In Washington state, that week in March lets us focus on the state’s Public Records Act — and more than 400 legislative exemptions that pockmark the venerable law. And now in April, one seriously problematic exemption allows lawmakers to avoid public scrutiny as they confront the most momentous issue before them in this legislative session.
The state House and Senate are coming up on crunch time regarding compliance with the state Supreme Court’s 2012 McCleary decision, in which justices ruled the state was not meeting its paramount duty on K-12 school funding. Lawmakers realistically must arrive at an agreement by the middle of this year, and it’s a safe bet that they are having numerous discussions and meetings with a range of public school stakeholders. We know what they are talking about, and that’s McCleary.
But who exactly is meeting with them? Why are legislators talking with these specific parties? When did the meetings take place? Why will a particular policy head in a certain direction? How did a decision get made in the way that it did? We don’t know, because legislators have largely exempted themselves from the Public Records Act. A story in Sunday’s edition of The Seattle Times highlighted the difficulty in getting that information through a records request by the Times and public radio Northwest News Network.
It’s a bipartisan problem. The request sought the legislative calendars of Democratic House Speaker Frank Chopp and Senate Democratic Minority Leader Sharon Nelson, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mark Schoesler and Republican House Minority Leader Dan Kristiansen. It also sought emails sent to and from the legislative leaders regarding the state’s budget and school funding. The response from all was a decided “No.”
They don’t want to even talk about the exemption; the Times reported Schoesler and Nelson did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Chopp and Kristiansen declined requests for interviews, though later, in separate statements through staff, said that they’d be willing to review how state records laws apply to lawmakers after legislative session concludes. But that does nothing for a public that wants to know now what is happening now on school funding.
The state’s Public Records Act arose out of 1972’s Initiative 276, to which voters gave 72 percent approval. But lawmakers apparently are relying on language that predates the initiative, in which “reports or correspondence made or received by or in any way under the personal control of the individual members of the Legislature” are not public record. Other elected state officials, including Gov. Jay Inslee, have opened emails and calendars to public view.
Washington prides itself on being a leader in records access. But on this issue, the state lags behind at least a dozen other states that require lawmakers to release some or all of their emails or calendar items. As a result, the public is largely in the dark about current decisions that carry a tremendous impact on future generations of students. The public and our current and future K-12 students deserve to know not just the what of education policy, but the who, why, when, where and how.
