We have no desire to rehash the long list of mistakes our state leaders made during the last session of the Indiana General Assembly. We do urge them to avoid rushing into another one.
The background of the latest move involves Rep. Eric Koch, R-Bedford.
As things stand now, to encourage solar energy use, people can “sell” their solar power back to utility companies, such as Duke Energy. The exchange is at the same rate. The way we understand the situation, if Duke charges a person $1 for a unit of energy, the person with solar can sell a unit energy to Duke for $1.
But that exchange does not take into account the cost of maintaining the power lines, transformers and all the equipment we know as “the grid.” In one view, the person who could afford to put in solar is bearing none of those costs, but benefiting from the grid. The rest of the community is paying more for those routine functions. Many, including the Citizens Action Coalition and the Energy and Policy Institute, cried foul. In their view, the bill would penalize solar producers, remove key incentives for alternative energy use and benefit big power companies.
In the end, House Speaker Brian Bosma, R-Indianapolis, pulled the bill.
Later those two lobbying groups — Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana and the Energy and Policy Institute — filed an open records request seeking correspondence between Koch, who chairs the Energy, Utilities and Telecommunications Committee, and various utilities regarding that solar bill. The lawmakers rejected that request. The two lobbying groups sued.
Then the Journal Gazette of Fort Wayne broke the bigger story. House Republicans are rewriting the rules so their work product would be hidden from public view. The idea is to exempt from open records laws documents, notes or records that are created, modified or edited by members of lawmakers’ staffs.
Steve Key, an attorney and executive director of the Hoosier State Press Association, is among those who find this ridiculous. He said it would go so far that an “email about lunch would be work product.”
“They are trying to define everything they do as work product,which is very unfortunate,” Key said.
We agree. Hoosiers have the right to know who is influencing their elected representatives and why that pressure is being applied.
We do concede some instances where exceptions must be made. Hoosiers contact lawmakers about some tough issues — sexual assault comes to mind — that must be handled with sensitivity. There is a line to be respected.
By and large, Indiana has registered three decades of success in creating open records while respecting that line. The law, by the way, aims to provide Hoosiers with “broad and easy access” to public documents so they can “more fully participate in the governmental process.”
Previous efforts to shut off that access have been shot down.
In 2001, lawmakers passed a bill stating the General Assembly was not covered by the open records law. The late Gov. Frank O’Bannon, a veteran newspaperman, vetoed the legislation. The next year, an attempt to exclude lawmakers’ emails from public access was defeated.
Now lawmakers are trying to close the door again.
That would be a big mistake.