Best government is an open one

Ten years ago, what’s now called Sunshine Week — a public awareness campaign centered on the need for government to be open and accessible — had its start in Florida. It’s not surprising that the Sunshine State adopted that motif as a symbol of open government.

But governments in every state, including this one, should operate with openness as the rule, not the exception, maintaining more than lip-service to its sunshine laws.

Unfortunately, the reality is cloudier. As good-government advocates are making evident during various events this week, there are various ways elected officials fall short of the ideal in Hawaii. Even as they now have the ability to connect with the public using both virtual and printed notices and documents — and the Legislature has greatly improved its outreach in this way — some agencies have only mixed success.

One example: The Honolulu City Council offers quite a lot of information on its site, but it takes a road map to find it. The uninitiated may do a Google search, pick one of a few top-ranked portals and still be a half-dozen clicks away from the legislation, testimony or whatever they want. That whole system could use a redesign for easier navigation, and government should use all of its channels to reach the widest possible spectrum of the population — including those without access to the Internet.

Some agencies could use a push to make their records more readily available. The Hawaii Community Development Authority holds public meetings as it should, for instance, but could do much better at making its documents available in advance, given that its hearing schedule doesn’t make attendance very easy for many people.

Another deficit on the good-government agenda is resistance to curbs on financial influence in politics. Every year, lawmakers introduce bills to relax the rules about the freebies they can accept. Thankfully, that effort stalled this session. Yes, it can be beneficial for lawmakers to attend nonprofit events, provided the nonprofit organization doesn’t cover the cost of the ticket.

And even modest initiatives to strengthen publicly funded campaigns have fallen by the wayside. Revisions are needed to make the existing Hawaii island clean-elections pilot project work better, but lawmakers didn’t push the enabling bill hard enough.

Openness can conflict with other public-policy goals, such as streamlining government. For example, Senate Bill 3010 would open a five-year window during which 10 of the state’s bridge projects would be essentially exempt from many state review processes, which means fewer people would be alerted to their progress. Even in the drive to reduce the red tape of permitting, the public needs to have its voice.

Technology is changing the landscape of government operations, and some of the rules haven’t caught up. Advocates want to make sure important decisions are made in the open, not in private discussions. That’s why the Office of Information Practices is right to pursue SB 2859, which clarifies how board members can communicate with each other outside an official meeting with a quorum. The law would let board members communicate through social media as long as their board adopts a policy allowing it and "no commitment to vote is made or sought."

Happily, the community has been stepping up to help citizens work past the hurdles in civic engagement. Among the remaining Sunshine Week activities, Common Cause Hawai‘i, Kanu Hawaii and the League of Women Voters of Hawaii are sponsoring "Democracy Under the Influence," a workshop, 5:30-7:30 tonight in room 307, Laniakea YWCA, 1040 Richards St.

Sierra Club Hawaii keeps a blog in which volunteer teams explain bills in various public-interest categories (www.capitolwatchhawaii.org). A group of nonprofits have partnered to post Hawaii Policy Portal, a free Web tool to make involvement simpler.

All of this effort serves to underscore an inescapable fact: Everyone claims to be for openness, but ensuring that there’s sunshine in government means that the public has to push to keep the doors and windows open. Ultimately, the work of Sunshine Week falls to all of us.