Closed doors are opening to winds of change

The South Mississippi Sun Herald

March 21, 2008

Calls for change this year are resonating with the American public. As the rising chorus of voices swells, it's heartening to sense a mood of change in Mississippi which in the past has been called a closed society.

A sign of change came on the legislative front during Sunshine Week, last week, as media around the country wrote articles to raise awareness of the dangers of secrecy and the importance of open government.

Without dissent the Mississippi Senate passed a bill to improve access to incident reports of crime. The vote in the House was almost unanimous with only three 'no' votes.

Negotiations between the Mississippi Press Association Government Affairs Committee and law enforcement officials resulted in an agreement that ended a five-year battle to get this important change. For five years law enforcement associations lobbied against previous bills, but a change of heart occurred. We hope that a change in attitude of law enforcement officials will follow and make more information about crimes public.

Accountability will be enhanced with the ethics bill which the Senate passed without dissent. This ethics reform bill requires economic development boards to disclose sources of income, requires public officials to disclose gifts and travel funded by private groups, establishes regulations for blind trusts, and broadens the coverage of nepotism laws.

Another pending bill requires more disclosure of information about contracts made with private lawyers by the office of attorney general.

But while laws provide the tools to get information from government, they do not solve the problem of attitudes that fuel a climate of secrecy.

Some evidence of change in views on transparency, however, has been evident recently.

'It has been, is and will continue to be the practice of this board to conduct the public's business in a manner that is open to the public at all times unless an executive session is declared by law,' Pike County supervisors' president Tazwell Bowsky told the Enterprise Journal.

Legislators have introduced and supported bills this session to open up government in Mississippi. Statements of support for open government have been made by Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant, Speaker of the House Billy McCoy, and others.

A bill that would allow the airport authority to meet in private with business prospects died. 'The feeling in the Senate is that we need to strengthen the open meetings law and we are very, very reluctant to do anything to weaken the open meetings law,' committee member David Blount, D-Jackson, told the Sun Herald. 'Taxpayers pay the bills for our government and therefore have a right to complete participation and a right to demand accountability for everything government does.'

State Rep. Toby Barker, R-Hattiesburg, wants to give the public access to state contracts, subcontracts and grants and introduced a bill to create a Web site to put this information online.

'It's important for the government to be transparent,' Barker told the Hattiesburg American. 'People have a right to know the information on how their tax money is being spent.'

Rep. Steven Palazzo, R-Biloxi, wants expenditures over $25,000 put online and made a public record. 'It's not the good old boy system anymore. It's the young conservative representatives that are shedding light and listening to our constituents and following through,' Palazzo said in an interview with the Hattiesburg American.

'Nothing should be secret, from one cent to $25 million, Palazzo said. The government belongs to the people, and everything we do is sanctioned by the people. They should have a right of knowing what we're doing. The day that they don't know what we're doing they should boot us all out.'

Such statements of support for open government from legislators are very encouraging and reflect some changing attitudes in a state that has a history of secrecy.

'Much of what Mississippi's governmental bodies seek to hide is simply embarrassing,' editorialized the Bolivar Commercial. 'The secrecy about secrecy that presidents know is that with the exception of when the security of the nation is at the ramparts, secrecy finds little, if any place in a free and democratic country.'

As documented in an eight-day series in February called 'Mississippi: The Secret State,' problems of access to meetings and records exist around the state. So we know that attitudes about the value of being transparent need to be changed, and that won't be easy. But we just have to keep at it - winning hearts and minds on this issue.

Perhaps the winds of change are blowing across this state. Change doesn't come easy, but this legislative session gives us hope that change can occur. We need to keep working to educate the public about their right

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