This year, amid all their momentous actions, your Senators and Representatives in St. Paul found time to ruminate about changes to the Minnesota Data Practices Act. They argued over whether people appointed to public boards and commissions could keep their home addresses secret from you.

The Data Practices Act has one of the dullest names around, but it’s a living, breathing thing for those of us in the news business. This is the law that forces civil servants in Minnesota to hand over the documents that tell us how they make decisions. Without it, they wouldn’t have to give us reports on bridge safety inspections, databases of government employee salaries, criminal arrest records, disciplinary actions against licensed professionals and untold volumes of other information.

Earlier this year, Administration Commissioner Dana Badgerow ordered that the home addresses of volunteer members of government boards be temporarily classified, meaning that they could keep lobbyists and others from finding these citizen policymakers outside of public meetings. The request came from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, which was forwarding a request from members of the Minnesota Climate Change Advisory Group. Even though they were launched by Gov. Tim Pawlenty to confront a “defining issue of our time,” members of the group didn’t want to be pestered at home by all of the groups and individuals interested in their work. So they persuaded Pawlenty’s administration commissioner to make it harder for the public to contact them.

As you can tell, I’m biased on this issue. I believe in open government and open records. Our job would be very difficult without either. I’m disturbed by the post-9/11 tendency of government at all levels to restrict information that used to be public and to operate in the shadows.

The Star Tribune belongs to an organization that lobbies the Legislature called the Minnesota Newspaper Association. A lobbyist for the MNA, Mark Anfinson, told me that lawmakers wanted to address what he called the “goofy” decision to make the home information secret.

“It is a little bit troubling to think that people could be appointed to major appointed bodies and no one would know where they lived,” Anfinson said.

If a member of a board or commission actually feels the disclosure of their address could put them in danger, the Data Practices Act has a provision to allow for withholding that information, Anfinson said.

As of last week, the House and Senate had unanimously passed a bill that required the home information to be public for elected officials and appointees to government boards and commissions, according to the Minnesota Legislature’s information for Senate bill 3235 posted on the web. According to the bill, board appointees can withhold their phone number, however, but still must provide an email address to the public.

The bill has a few other interesting tidbits:

It makes secret any records from the electronic devices that people use to pay for parking at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. Presumably that’s to keep people from tracking who’s parking at the airport by demanding government records from automated parking system.

It prohibits the government from printing Social Security numbers on the face of mailings, presumably to prevent identity theft.

It allows the state fire marshal to withhold information on where people are storing or using “explosives or blasting agents.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 10:52 am and is filed under Public records. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.