Fitzsimon File

Back in the 1980s, one of the most frequently repeated jokes in the General Assembly involved a first-year Senator being given a tour of the legislative building by a Senate veteran and coming upon the late Senator Ken Royall of Durham, the powerful budget chair, standing by himself, leaning on one of the light gray cinder block walls.

The newly-elected Senator told his guide that he heard a lot about Senator Royall and started to rush to introduce himself.  The veteran Senator grabbed his arm and said don’t bother Senator Royall now, he is having an appropriations meeting.

There was a lot of truth to the story until the late 1980s. The state budget was prepared every year in secret by the “supersub,” eight powerful members of the House and Senate who decided what would be funded and what wouldn’t and didn’t appreciate being asked too many questions about it.

But reporters started asking questions, especially after discovering the supersub meeting one Sunday night in a locked Legislative Office Building, and Republicans made the secret budget process a campaign issue.

Senator Tony Rand was a member of the supersub and ran for Lieutenant Governor in 1988 against Republican Jim Gardner.  Gardner hammered Rand in a debate, saying that eight powerful Democrats met in secret one Sunday to write the state budget.

Rand’s response was “that weren’t eight of us there, there were six or seven of us there,” prompting laughter from the audience, confirming Gardner’s allegation and signaling an end to the wide acceptance of the secret supersub as a legitimate mechanism to do the public’s business.

Governor Mike Easley has proclaimed Thursday as Sunshine Day in North Carolina to “celebrate and create further awareness of the importance of the practice of open government.”  Let’s hope Easley himself read the proclamation and reconsiders his administration’s policy on preserving emails, not to mention letters from former cabinet secretaries sent to him directly.

But Thursday is open government day and this is open government week. The nonpartisan N.C. Open Government Coalition is holding a conference Thursday at Elon University featuring a keynote address by Debbie Crane, who was recently fired as Public Affairs Director of the Department of Health and Human Services.

The coalition also released the responses to a questionnaire about public records and open government from the candidates for governor and lieutenant governor and for the most part, it’s good news.

The majority of candidates claim to be committed to making state government more transparent and making more information available online. There were disagreements about making the names of finalists for top university jobs public and the state paying the legal fees of people who sue to obtain illegally withheld public documents.

The candidates were also divided about requiring a supermajority vote by the General Assembly to weaken public record laws. It is an understandable sentiment, but still an odd question, when almost every other decision made by legislators requires only majority support.

Congress can declare war with a simple majority. The proposal isn’t worthy of the coalition and resembles one by the hard right groups who want a supermajority vote to raise any taxes or fees. But overall the survey is valuable and the candidates are now on the record.

Senator Royall passed away several years ago (his commitment to funding mental health services is still sorely missed) and the supersub’s “gang of eight” is mostly a distant memory.  Mostly.

Some vestiges of the secrecy era remain, even in leaders professing support of the Coalition’s goals. Senator Walter Dalton is running for Lieutenant Governor and now has Royall’s old job.  He told the coalition that he “was very proud as co-chair of the state budget this year that every session was open.”

U.S. Senate candidate Kay Hagan made similar remarks last session in her role as Dalton’s Co-Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, proclaiming that the budget meetings were open to whoever stopped by the room where the Senators were working at all hours on the spending plan.

The problem is that the meetings were not announced in advance and the agenda was not made public, both of which are part of the definition of an open meeting. Just a few years ago, Senate President Pro Tem Marc Basnight defended the budget process, saying that anyone who wanted something in the budget could come to his office and ask for it.

The General Assembly has come a long way since there were “six or seven legislators there," in a locked building on Sunday nights, but there is still work to do to make sure the sun shines on all the business conducted in the building on Jones Street with with the gray cinder block walls, and throughout the rest of state government. It is our business after all.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 4:43 am and is filed under Fitzsimon File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.