For decades now, the Texas Legislature has seen proposed legislation that seeks to erase the legal requirement that government entities publish announcements of meetings, tax increases, requests for bids and other important public notices in their local newspaper of record. This year is no different.
Publication requirements exist for a simple and essential reason: Voters deserve to know what their elected officials are doing, and taxpayers deserve to know how their money is being spent. In the Rio Grande Valley alone, nary a year goes by without some Valley official facing charges of corruption such as bribery, bid rigging, giving lucrative contracts to friends without giving competitors to bid on them, etc. — and that’s with these public notice laws in place. We can only imagine how much worse things might be if those officials were able to enjoy greater secrecy.
Fortunately, many of those proposed changes don’t pass; some, however, do, or are surreptitiously added to unrelated bills and might escape detection amid the rush to act on the thousands of bills that lawmakers see in the short 140-day legislative session.
And those that don’t pass are reintroduced in the next session, forcing those who respect the open government to exercise the same persistence and vigilance as those who continue to try to snuff out the light of public knowledge from their activities.
Some bills would eliminate public notice outright, either for the entire city or county government or for specific departments. Every department, however, utilizes public funds and engages in activity that affects the public, and thus must remain accountable — not only to the councils and commissions above them but also to the community at large.
Other bills propose alternative ways to meet the requirement to inform the public, usually on a government office’s website. To be sure, they should be doing that already; history has shown, however, that some entities have buried certain notices, such as notices of tax increases or requests for bids, under layers of web pages that many people will never see, or that only informed bidders might be able to find.
Some officials have complained that of the cost of buying space in the newspaper; however, government bodies are given the lowest rates available, and budget reviews have found that many of those bodies have spent more lobbying to escape public disclosure than they have on the notices themselves. Moreover, some suggested alternatives, such as direct mail or printing special flyers to be inserted with utility bills, likely would be more costly.
Fortunately, many lawmakers recognize our need for open government and have kept many of these efforts from succeeding. This year especially, the challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic and weather-related crises have inspired several to offer proposals that can address such issues in the future, such as the utilization of communications technology to enable more people to witness and participate in the process of governance. Others, however, seem to prefer making that participation more difficult, and trying to escape public scrutiny.
It appears the two sides will always exist. We can only pray that those who value honesty and accountability will continue to win out over those who seek to lurk in secrecy.
