Texas open meeting laws and new media

Last Tuesday, May 11, the Texas Senate State Affairs Committee spent nearly three hours discussing how the emergence of social media has changed the way governmental bodies conduct public business.

These new tools can be used by elected officials to better communicate with constituents. But as Keith Elkins, a former Capitol reporter and now executive director of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas, noted, elected officials could also use their cell phones, Blackberrys, laptops, and personal computers to communicate with one another in secrecy, outside of the state’s open records law and theTexas Open Meetings Act. He isn’t the first person to worry about this. Jason Stverak, president of the Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity, worried earlier this month about the lack of archiving in new media: while public officials are more available to their constituents, the are also more available to each other through means that circumvent open meetings law.

Senate State Affairs Committee chairman Robert Duncan, R-Lubbock, recommends the Texas Legislature address how elected officials use the Internet to assure the public that no one is using the technology to violate the state’s Open Meetings Act or the Public Information Act. He also said public officials should not live in fear of being accused of violating the Public Meetings Act if they use electronic devices to communicate with others.

I wrote last week about the being behind municipalities using taxpayer dollars to sue Texas in order to “gut” the state’s open meetings law. Last year, four cities and some 20 local officials from across the state filed a federal lawsuit, supported by the Texas Municipal League, arguing that the penalties for violating the Act are harsh and unconstitutional. These penalties includ six months in jail and a fine of up to $500.
“We’ve got some good folks who are threatened with jail by innocent remarks or e-mails” said Amarillo Mayor and League president Debra McCartt.

Of course, there are consequences for a law that isn’t strict. The Illinois FOIA improvements that went into effect this year have sought to remedy lax execution of the state’s open meetings and records laws by setting up strict deadlines for compliance, and severe penalties for failing to do so.

It seems the answer is for Open Meetings Laws to explicitly state what is and isn’t acceptable, and to make clear what the exemptions to the law are. These laws need to address changing technology. It isn’t fair to officials for them to be unclear about whether their Tweet breaks the law, and it isn’t fair to citizens to be unable to access a Tweet relating to public business. Lastly, breaking the law needs to come with penalties that are strict enough to induce compliance.

Join us tomorrow on Twitter from 2-3 Eastern Standard Time to talk about Texas Open Meetings Law and open meetings laws in your state. Use hashtag #FOIAchat to talk to other transparency advocates about questions you may have or your experiences with open meetings. (If you can’t make it, our discussions are always archived.) For a topic schedule, look here.

Where will we get news?

Regardless of what different people try to tell the American public about what is and isn’t news, and about how information should or shouldn’t be received, it’s clear that people will get information no matter what stands in their way. People don’t care if their local paper goes under. Why should they? Time and time again, experience has shown us that the investigative spirit of news reporting continues in whatever way it can.

For example, those who don’t consider Fox News “news” would still have found it a useful resource for the Van Jones debacle. Fox was the only major news organization to report on the former environmental adivisor’s inflamatory statements, which was ignored by such traditional media giants as The New York Times, The Washington Post and CBS.

Another reason to not despair about the news is that blogs can handle it. It was the blog BigGovernment.com that broke the story about ACORN corruption. Even before that, before blogs were on the radar as a threat to traditional news outlets, blogs were being used to correct the news. It was through blogs that documents presented by CBS anchor Dan Rather that allegedly showed President Bush had evaded the draft were shown to be forgeries.

Obviously, there isn’t a shortage of news. And where the traditional media has faltered, new media has prevailed. Print media is in trouble; The President has declared that the Fox News Network is “talk radio”, and he hasn’t been not the only one to have expressed concerns about the proliferation of news on blogs.

Still, we’ve got it better than ever.