A great overview and reminder that we still have a way to go to make government transparent and accountable, how it should be when folks are working on our dime.
Dan Walters: Legislature protects its secrecy
By Dan Walters - dwalters@sacbee.com
Published 12:00 am PDT Friday, March 21, 2008
Describing K.W. Lee as a dogged investigative reporter would be a gross understatement. An obsessive, even maniacal, heat-seeking journalistic missile in the target-rich environment of the state Capitol would be more like it.
During the early 1970s, while working for the Sacramento Union, Lee embarrassed Capitol politicians with revelations about the rich pension benefits they had voted for themselves, forcing the Legislature to rescind some goodies.
Lee also revealed that an Oakland assemblywoman was operating a travel agency adjacent to her district office and that hundreds of long-distance calls on her state-paid phone line were to hotels, cruise lines, consulates and other sites connected to her travel business. The Assembly's response to this rather outrageous misuse of taxpayers' money should have been censure. Instead, it shut down access to phone records.
That, however, merely revved up Lee even more, and he acquired some additional reportorial help in the person of yours truly. Over the ensuing months we delved into how the Legislature was spending the many millions of dollars it appropriated for itself. We were forced to find ways of overcoming the Legislature's almost complete exemption from the open records laws that it applied to other state agencies and local governments.
Some of our tips came from legislative employees disgusted with the waste and self-dealing they saw. But Lee also discovered a back door into legislative spending – the archives of the state controller's office. We spent countless hours poring through boxes of invoices paid out of the Legislature's budget, finding clues that evolved into stories.
