ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, February 29, 1996 TAG: 9602290058
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
VIRGINIANS this decade have witnessed a steady and alarming erosion of public access to public records and to the conduct of the public's business. On balance, this session of the General Assembly seems willing to slow the erosion, but not reverse it.
Prisons: The state Senate on Tuesday endorsed the Allen administration's don't-look policy by rejecting a measure to guarantee media access to willing inmates.
The bill, passed earlier by the House of Delegates, would have given corrections officials wide latitude in determining the circumstances and rules of such visits. But Senate opponents somehow saw it as a pro-crime measure: "I would suggest to those who think our jails are full of victims, they're not," said Republican Marty Williams of Newport News. "They're full of predators."
We would suggest to the good senator that he give the public a little credit for common sense: Murderers and rapists are unlikely subjects for groundswells of public sympathy. We would suggest further that the public still has an interest in knowing what's happening with the hundreds of millions of tax dollars being poured into prisons - knowledge that shouldn't depend solely on official boilerplate.
Hospitals: The University of Virginia and Virginia Commonwealth University agreed Wednesday to drop their demand for broad exemptions for their teaching hospitals from the state's open-meetings and records-access laws.
Kudos for that. Under an earlier university proposal, discussions or records containing "competitively sensitive information" would have been exempt from state freedom-of-information requirements - a loophole big enough to drive an ambulance through. The committee approved substitute versions to avoid the precedent of setting broad, vague exemptions to the open-government rules.
Government databases: Good-news, bad-news creation of a Virginia Information Providers Network is headed toward a conference committee to reconcile differences in House and Senate bills.
The good news: bringing centralized management to the storage and accessing of computerized public information. The bad news, a proposal to set up a potential monopoly to peddle state data, has been tabled for the session. But the conferees should jettison the idea of establishing the network as a for-profit enterprise. Public information belongs to the public in general, not just those able and willing to pay whatever price the state sets. Individuals and small businesses should have the same access that, say, newspapers can afford.
For open-government advocates, the current session seems likely to produce other small victories: community-notification requirements when felons are released from prison, provisions for the indexing of state computer databases, mandatory trial as adults (thus in open court) for juveniles accused of particularly serious crimes.
As a rule, though, the victories have been either rearguard actions to prevent further erosion of open-government principles or housekeeping chores that, while welcome as efforts to keep up with technology, do not expand public access.
LENGTH: Medium: 63 lines KEYWORDS: GENERAL ASSEMBLY 1996by CNB