From the Asheville Citizen-Times (9/11/09): Gov. Bev Perdue used the first veto of her young administration Thursday to defy the General Assembly over a previously little-noticed public-records bill.
The measure would have added to the already extensive laws that keep legislators’ behind-the-scenes work secret.
Now lawmakers, who supported the bill unanimously in the waning August days of their session, will decide whether to try to muster the three-fifths votes necessary to override Perdue’s veto.
Perdue has pushed for transparency in her administration by posting information online about state contracts and opening previously closed records. Now she’s demanding it of lawmakers, saying in her message to them that the bill “unnecessarily adds new restrictions on public access to documents and information.”
But exempting themselves from the open-records laws they make is nothing new for legislators.
Laws already on the books make documents prepared for legislators confidential. Legislative staffers have limited immunity from testifying about their work in court.
The bill Perdue vetoed would tighten that secrecy further and put more limits on how much executive-branch employees can tell each other and the public about requests by legislators.
State employees outside the legislature who break the rules could be charged with a misdemeanor, which Perdue called unfair.
“The legislature went across the line,” she told reporters. “They left the legislature and they’re messing around in the executive branch now, and I tell you what: I don’t believe anybody over there has the right to tell the 9 1/2 million people who call North Carolina home that these documents are not public documents if they’re in the executive branch of government.”
As early as next week, Perdue will call lawmakers back into session. If they agree to come back, they can only consider the vetoed bill.
Lawmakers were puzzled Thursday. Rep. Paul “Skip” Stam, R-Wake, and a sponsor of the bill, sees it as “a very minor issue” and said Perdue’s office hadn’t approached him about it before the veto. Rep. Susan Fisher, D-Buncombe, wants to hear Perdue’s reasoning but said it seems to protect state employees’ work from scrutiny.
Stam said there’s a reason to shield the process of drafting legislation from public view.
He sometimes goes through a dozen draft versions of a bill before introducing it, he said.
“If the dozen versions are all public records,” Stam said, “then not only do I have to defend my votes and what I decided to actually print, but I have to defend the mistakes I made, and the wrong answers from an assistant who put down the wrong things.”
by Jordan Schrader, Citizen-Times Staff Writer