Ask Maryland politicians whether they believe in the need for transparent government, and they're sure to say yes. But when it comes to actually finding ways to make it easier for citizens to learn what their elected representatives are doing in Annapolis, the talk doesn't translate to much action. Our delegates, senators and governor aren't necessarily hostile to the idea of revealing the secrets of State Circle. In 2008, for example, they passed the "Google Government" bill that put information about all state contracts online in a searchable format.
But there is no well-funded lobby for transparency and no constituency to regularly march on the State House to demand more openness. That said, making government more transparent has one appealing quality in a year that will otherwise likely be dominated by the dire state of Maryland's budget: It may be the cheapest accomplishment our lawmakers can make.
To that end, here are a few things Maryland could do to make government more open and transparent:
* Webcast debates. The General Assembly's Web site now features live-streaming audio of floor debates, but those only occur at the very end of the legislative process, after most of the meaningful discussion has taken place and after most amendments have already been considered. Annapolis operates on a strong committee system, which means that the real work takes place outside the ornate House and Senate chambers and down Rowe Boulevard in the Miller and Taylor office buildings. The Senate committees make audio recordings of their proceedings, which are available after the fact on CD, but the House does not. There's no reason committee hearings should not also be live-streamed and archived like the floor debates.
Ideally, the legislature would upgrade its capabilities to allow streaming video of both hearings and floor debates. If not, it should at least devise a system to indicate who is speaking at any given time. The only people who can make good use of the audio feed now are those who have sat through countless hours of legislative sessions and thus can identify each of the 188 legislators by voice and the vague descriptions provided by the presiding officers - "I now recognize the gentle lady from the Middle Shore," etc.
* Make it easy to find voting records. Floor votes are posted online (and generally a day or two after the fact), but they only tell a part of the story. Bills live or die based on votes taken in committees, and finding out how your delegate or senator voted on any particular bill is essentially impossible to do without driving to Annapolis, going to the committee office and asking a staffer to pull the legislative file. There's no reason those votes shouldn't also be put online, an idea being pursued by Del. Saqib Ali, a Montgomery County Democrat. (In what was, up until recently, the best-kept secret in Annapolis, Senate committee vote sheets are now scanned and posted online with the Senate Journal after the end of the session, though they are not searchable or indexed; if you can find them, you deserve a prize.) Furthermore, to receive real-time information on floor votes, you have to subscribe to the legislature's Up-to-the-minute service, which costs $800 a year. It should be free.
Speaking of legislative files, the Baltimore City Council, for example, puts the entire thing online, including letters of support or opposition, staff analyses and other correspondence. The state should do the same.
* Improve access to financial disclosure files. Wonder whether your senator or delegate might have a conflict of interest related to a piece of legislation? State financial disclosure statements, required annually of elected and many appointed officials, often have the answer. If your representative is voting on legislation that would benefit a particular company, for example, the form will tell you whether his or her spouse works there, or whether he or she owns a chunk of company stock. But to check, you have to physically go to the state Ethics Commission's offices on Calvert Street in Annapolis. Most states put that information online. Maryland should, too.
The Ethics Commission had made strides in accountability in recent years, though, with the posting online of lobbyist registrations and activity reports. It's now possible to find out how much a given company is paying to lobby in Annapolis (or what clients a lobbyist works for) without leaving home.
* Publish more campaign finance information. No sense of who wields influence in Annapolis (or in virtually any capital) is complete without seeing where politicians get the money that funds their campaigns. That information has been online in Maryland for years. But it's only moderately helpful in showing where the influence flows. Unlike the federal government, Maryland does not ask campaign donors to list their employer and occupation. That makes it difficult, for example, to figure out who's getting money from the insurance industry or horse racing lobby or the liquor industry or any of a dozen other well-heeled special interests. Maryland should update its standards to match the federal government.
* Make StateStat more understandable. Gov. Martin O'Malley has put a tremendous amount of data about the nitty-gritty of state government online through the StateStat Web site. In particular, Maryland has a strong application for tracking the spending of federal stimulus dollars - by clicking through a state map, you can find out how much money is going to what counties for what purposes, in some cases with details about who won the bid for the job, what stage it's in and how many jobs are expected to be created as a result. The more complete that dataset becomes, the better.
In StateStat, the data are incredibly detailed. Want to know how many sick days were taken by Department of Human Services staff in Allegany County in September? It's in there. In fact, there's so much information that it's hard to make sense of it all. Summaries of the discussions held at the biweekly StateStat meetings provide some clues about the important trends in the data, but that mainly serves to suggest that the public could make much more sense of it all if it the sessions were more open. Webcasts of the meetings would be a good start.
BayStat, by contrast, is much easier to understand. It provides simple charts of up-to-date measures of water quality in the Chesapeake and clearly states what our goals are, why they're important and how close we are to achieving them.
Maryland's budget woes may make this year's General Assembly session a downer, but pursuing a transparency agenda could redeem an otherwise painful election year. We have little doubt that voters would look favorably on candidates who could tell their constituents that they reformed Annapolis to make it more accountable.
Readers respond
Excellent and detailed editorial, but my fear is that the flood of information will confuse and not clarify matters for a lot of people except the most ardent followers of statecraft. StateStat is case in point. Is transparency an automatic deterrence to corruption and nepotism? Does not such deterrence depend on an informed and engaged electorate - people who actually search the databases, read and understand the cumbersome information presented, see the connections among the money flow, the floor votes and the deals made in committees and use this knowledge to keep politicians honest? Politicians rely on voter apathy, even in this digital age, to pull off fast ones.
Skeptic
Each session our politicians should be forced to wear logos of every lobbyist who gave them money, like they do with golf sponsors.
Carole