One more note. Doug Gansler or any other consititutinal official (your clerk of courts or county sheriff) can create bodies willy-nilly to whom the Act does not apply at all. Bad bill drafting or huge loophole? You decide.

The fix? “All advisory commitees or workgroups however created shall be public bodies, including those created by the General Assembly during the course of its business.” Or something like that.

The Act is flawed because it defines “public bodies” in such a way that any “workgroup” created by anyone isn’t subject to it. If the public body is created by the state Constituion, a Resolution, Bylaws, or legislation, it’s a public body.

Let’s just say it took me years to realize that the Act was written for the convenience of the General Assembly. Writing it to protect their turf makes it crazy when you try to apply it to other branches of gov’t.

And the bill that created the Joint Committee on Transparnecy (oops) also redefined “minutes” to be exactly what the Gen Ass’y does now. So what they do, however lame, is nominally legal.

Quoting from the state’s own Court of Appeals on the Open Meetings Act

<>

The article must have been revised just after I read it, but the notion that our lawmakers need some “secrecy” while making laws is exactly why the open-meeting law was put into effect. The secrecy is what creates the playground for under-the-table deals, smoke-filled, back room negotiation, and the festering swamps of illegal and illicit activities we specifically wanted to eradicate from our lawmaking process.

As hungrypirana mentioned, we shouldn’t be worried about what our ‘counterparts’ are doing. I don’t know if that legislator was referring to his or her counterparts in the Senate or legislators in other states, but it still shouldn’t matter. The House of Delegates should do what is right and best for the State of Maryland – not for anyone else. If this delegate can’t figure that out, then he or she shouldn’t be a delegate.

Maryland may have made some improvements in providing information to its citizens in the past year or two, but we still are one of the worst states for transparency in that sense. In the larger sense of our government being open to what they are thinking and planning on doing as well as what they are actually doing with the taxpayer money and resources they have, the mentality of that sort of transparency just doesn’t exist either in our elected officials or in most of the permanent civil servants in our state, from the Governor on down. Until the Governor starts leading in that area, nobody else in the state government is going to follow – that’s the way it works.

I hear two reasons underlying the 6 – 41 vote against Kittleman’s proposal. (1) we don’t know what our counterparts are doing, and (2) webcasting our committee voting sessions will compromise our secrecy.

It shouldn’t be hard to document current practices in other states. That could be done in 2 – 3 days. It should be done for the legislature and presented to them. They will otherwise drag their feet.

The second reason is the most formidable (and telling) impediment to Kitterman’s and your transparency goal. My first thought is take ’em to court on constitutional grounds. Surely MD constitution does not protect secrecy of legislative work.