Our View

We are pleased to share that your Wyoming newspapers have once again won the battle that we suit up for once a year. Our legislature debates new laws that would shroud your government in secrecy and we point out why that’s a terrible idea.

This year, the legislature wanted to take public notices out of the hands of newspapers – independent organizations with no dog in the fight other than the mandate to make sure our government is run honestly – and put them in the hands of the people making the notices in the first place. The ones who may feel shy about sharing what they’ve been up to with the world.

They wished to do this by either having government entities put public documents online themselves or by creating a centralized website for every entity in Wyoming to submit to (House Bills 201 and 242). In both instances, it’s the people we have elected or appointed to do the work of government who would control how much of that work is seen by the public.

We are also pleased to point out that our local member of the House, Representative Tyler Lindholm, made an effort to amend the centralized website bill to state that notices should be published there as well as in local newspapers, not instead of, before the bill died.

But even though the bills have been consigned to the recycling bill for another year, we feel it’s important to examine what was happening. Had they passed, you can imagine the scenario without a lot of effort:

An elected official makes a decision they know some people won’t like and thinks, well, maybe I can slip this one past them, just this once. What’s the harm? I’m doing this for their own good, but they might not understand that.

And there they stand, at the top of the slippery slope, unaware how deep the chasm could go. Because it will probably work fine the first time, which means they’ll be more inclined to try it a second time, and a third, and eventually we know next to nothing about what’s really going on.

It’s a slippery slope even for the most upstanding person, because being transparent is hard work. No matter how good your intentions, “you can’t please all of the people all of the time” is a cliché for very good reason.

Who could blame an elected for feeling tempted to avoid the scrutiny? Especially when they deal with divisive issues that could affect their chances of winning the next election. Democracy is our greatest treasure, but it does come with certain downsides – and one of those is the need to protect your next set of votes.

What we’ve discussed so far leans on the idea that every elected official is upstanding and honest and already we can see the downsides of this legislation. But the problem is much worse when you consider that transparency as a concept is intended to catch wrongdoers in the act, not upstanding officials, and this legislation would make that nigh impossible.

If you were a corrupt official who was siphoning public money, indulging in nepotism, breaking the rules or nudging policy in a direction to benefit yourself, what are the chances that you would volunteer to share that information? Your newspaper is a watchdog, demanding that these documents be made public and in the process making it more difficult to be corrupt.

And if you’re thinking that it’s surely not that big a deal in a place where we all know each other’s names, remember that corruption is something we’ve seen even in Crook County. Note, for example, that there have been several fraud cases in recent years involving personal use of an organization’s money.

Last year, the county commission was forced to investigate an incident in which someone in the courthouse created an “admin” account for themselves that provided access to all sorts of records a single person should not have the right to play with.

At the time, County Clerk Linda Fritz, who discovered the existence of the account, commented:

“This gives them the ability to create, edit, delete and duplicate motor vehicle titles. With this knowledge, it is impossible for me to guarantee the accuracy of any titles, as another office has had the ability to alter them going back as far as 2006.”

Someone in the courthouse – and we still don’t know who – was not playing by the rules. That particular hole has been plugged, but it was definitive proof that someone who may still be present in one of those offices is willing to break the rules and give themselves access that could mask their wrongdoing.

Do we really want that person to lose accountability? Are we sure we trust that person to publish every public record for themselves, or would we rather there was a third party forcing the issue? We would argue that our county’s money and welfare are both better off with an independent organization standing sentinel.

And none of this touches on the potential cost of such a change. We have heard it argued at the state that towns and counties could save a lot of money by not having to publish their legals.

But would they really? How many dollars would be spent on a central website for every public document in Wyoming, both to set it up and then to keep it maintained?

This website, it should be noticed, would exist in addition to two that were created by state newspapers to ensure that every public notice is available to anyone who wishes to see it: publicnoticeads.com/WY and wyopublicnotices.com.

Alternatively, would the towns and counties be asking for volunteers to format and upload notices, or would they be employing someone to do it? If we can be sure of one thing when it comes to politics, it’s that the government cannot function nearly as efficiently as private business – nor as frugally.

Municipal and county governments in fact currently spend less than half of one percent of their budgets on ensuring transparency of your public notices.

Put all of this together and what you had was a proposal that would have seen as much, if not more, of your money spent on something that made it more difficult to be sure your government was being honest with you. If there was an upside to this idea, they were definitely keeping it hidden from us.