Month: March 2018

Folks seem to be all in an uproar over what they think is the Washington State Legislature’s need for secrecy. It seems that folks want them all out NOW or sooner for ostensibly obstructing the public’s right to information. The corporate media has the public convinced that there is foul play afoot. Hermann Goering would be proud of the propaganda machine our media has become.

If you don’t want the State Patrol, Department of Licensing, Department of Revenue, Department of Social and Health Services, and so on to read in the news about your complaints about them to your legislators, reading on might do you well…oh, except uninformed clamor has made a mess of the situation. Perhaps this is merely a history lesson to learn from if things go south and you wonder why.

It is apparent from comments on the subject that folks don’t bother to read the bill, they just grab the pitchforks because the media has implied strongly to them that it must be done. To save the folks the arduous task of actually reading 25 pages, here is, in seven pages, is the cliffnotes version.

(To save even more reading, the cliffnotes version of the cliffnotes version is that the legislature was hiding absolutely nothing with the passage of this bill, just protecting the private information of constituents, legislators, and their employees – social security numbers, credit card numbers, home addresses, etc. are nobody’s business – read the list of records made available in Section 103 and the list of protected information in Section 105.)

AN ACT
Amending RCW 42.56 (PUBLIC RECORDS ACT)… (“Each state agency shall separately state and currently publish”) – (“(1) “Agency” includes all state agencies and all local agencies. “State agency” includes every state office, department, division, bureau, board, commission, or other state agency. “Local agency” includes every county, city, town, municipal corporation, quasi-municipal corporation, or special purpose district, or any office, department, division, bureau, board, commission, or agency thereof, or other local public agency.”)

(——————-

• Point of contention. Legislature is a branch of government, not an agency. Judge’s ruling says that is true, but each individual legislator is a government agency. That ruling is so far beyond a stretch that even stretching the definition of an agency as far as it goes, you can’t see the ruling from there. Heretofore, as a branch of government, the Legislature has had public disclosure rules. By his ruling, the judge has created 147 public agencies. Each member of the part time legislature would need to staff its office a minimum of 30 hours per week, and produce requested records promptly. That directive would be responsible for 147 full time jobs.
• Point of clarification. Agencies do not have constituents. Therefore there is nothing secret. Legislators have constituents. Your conversation with them should be like talking to your doctor, lawyer, or accountant. Therefore, some things need to be secret. THIS IS AN IMPORTANT CONCEPT
• Point of clarification. Legislators are paid $48k per year for approximately 74% of a full time job. That would be $65k per year full time. Legislative assistants are paid about $44k per year. For comparison, that’s less than the average for restaurant manager, truck driver, or grocery store manager; close to the average for a news reporter. 147 full time legislative assistant jobs would be about $6.5 million. Legislators also make less than restaurant and grocery store managers and less than lots of truck drivers, but after all, they, like teachers, aren’t full time.

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Section 1.

Clarify: Legislature is a branch of government, like the judiciary, not an agency as used in RCW 42.56. Constitution defines access requirements.

Section 101. TITLE
Legislative Public Records Act

Section 102. RECORDS DISCLOSURE OBLIGATIONS OF THE LEGISLATIVE BRANCH.

• RCW 42.56 (PUBLIC RECORDS ACT) does not apply to legislative branch (The media wants you to stop reading here…and a lot of folks did, if they even got this far)
• Secretary and chief clerk must make public records available
• Secretary or designee is the public records officer for senate, senators, senate committees; chef clerk is public records officer for house, members of house, house committees; secretary and chief clerk are jointly public records officers for the senate and house collectively and joint committees

Section 103. DEFINITIONS (definitions have supreme importance in interpreting the language, even in the “cliffnotes” version)

• “Chief Clerk” means Chief Clerk of the House
• “Committee” means committee or subcommittee as defined in legislative rule and joint committees as defined by statute or resolution
• “Constituent” means individuals who are not lobbyists, lobbyist’s employers, sponsors of grassroots lobbying, public employees who lobby, elected officials or individuals who act in their behalf
• “Executive rules committee” means executive rules committee of the house or successor committees
• “Facilities and operations committee” means facilities and operations committee of the senate or successor committees defined in rule or procedure to administer polices and procedures and oversight of the senate.
• “Legislative agency” means joint legislative audit and review committee, joint legislative transportation committee, legislative evaluation and accountability committee, office of legislative support services, joint legislative systems committee, statute law committee, office of the code reviser, office of the state actuary, redistricting commission, legislative ethics board, or any other agency created by the legislative branch
• “legislative public records” means, regardless of physical form:

(THIS BILL MAKES ALL OF THESE AVAILABLE)

Correspondence, amendments, reports, and minutes of meetings, made by or submitted to legislative committees or subcommittees

Transcripts, other records of hearings, or supplementary written testimony or data thereof filed with committees or subcommittees in connection with the exercise of legislative or investigatory functions

Records, such as records of payments in lieu of per diem or reimbursement of member expenses

Personnel leave, travel, and payroll records

Records of legislative sessions such as journals, floor amendments and recordings of floor debate

Bills and bill reports

Legislators’ calendar notations of dates, events, and names of individuals or organizations, for meetings or events that are related to official legislative duties and that occur July 1, 2018, and thereafter

Legislators’ correspondence dated July 1, 2018, and thereafter on legislative business to and from persons outside the legislature who are not constituents

Any other record designated a legislative public record by1any official action of the senate or the house of representatives

• “legislative rule” rules adopted jointly or respectively by the houses of the legislature pursuant to Article II, section 9 of the state Constitution
• “Secretary” means secretary of the senate

Section 104. GENERAL DISCLOSURE DUTIES

• Chief clerk and secretary make public records available (see definition in 103)
• Chief clerk and secretary must prominently publish procedures for requesting legislative public records
• Chief clerk and the secretary may establish policies for producing, indexing, and identifying legislative public records
• No authority for chief clerk or secretary to give, sell, or provide access to lists of individuals requested for commercial purposes unless specifically directed by law

Section 105. DISCLOSURE EXEMPTIONS

(THIS IS WHAT IS KEPT PRIVATE AND NOT DISCLOSED)

• Records the disclosure of which would violate a person’s right of privacy including, but not limited to, personal information in files maintained for employees, appointees, or legislators
• A person’s right to privacy is invaded if disclosure of information about the person: (i) Would be highly offensive to a reasonable person and (ii) is not of legitimate concern to the public. The provisions of this chapter dealing with privacy in certain legislative public records do not create any right of privacy beyond those rights that are specified in this chapter as express exemptions from the public’s right to inspect, examine, or copy public records
• Information that would would invade the right of privacy under this subsection, the chief clerk and the secretary may delete identifying details when they make available or publish any legislative public record
• Credit card numbers, debit card numbers, electronic check numbers, card expiration dates, or bank or other financial information including social security numbers, except when disclosure is expressly required by or governed by other law
• Information in personnel records, public employment-related records, volunteer rosters, or included in any mailing list of employees or volunteers of any legislative house or agency: Residential addresses, residential telephone numbers, personal wireless telephone numbers, personal email addresses, social security numbers, driver’s license numbers, identicard numbers, and emergency contact information of employees or volunteers of a legislative house or agency, and the names, dates of birth, residential addresses, residential telephone numbers, personal wireless telephone numbers, personal email addresses, social security numbers, and emergency contact information of dependents of employees or volunteers of a legislative house or agency
• Records assembled, prepared, or maintained to prevent, mitigate, or respond to criminal terrorist acts
• Specific and unique vulnerability assessments or specific and unique response or deployment plans
• Records not subject to public disclosure under federal law that are shared by federal or international agencies, and information prepared from national security briefings provided to state or local government officials related to domestic preparedness for acts of terrorism
• Information regarding the public and private infrastructure and security of computer and telecommunications networks
• Records that are relevant to a controversy to which any entity of state government is a party but which records would not be available to another party under court rules for pretrial discovery
• Records that are subject to the speech or debate clause of Article II, section of the state Constitution including, but not limited to, preliminary drafts, notes, recommendations, and internal legislative and interbranch communication in which opinions are expressed or policies formulated or recommended

Section 106. REQUESTS–INSPECTION AND COPYING

• A legislative public records request must be for identifiable records. A request for all or substantially all records … is not a valid request for identifiable legislative public records under this chapter
• the chief clerk and the secretary shall, upon request for identifiable legislative public records, make them promptly available to any person
• The chief clerk and the secretary shall not distinguish among persons requesting records, and such persons are not required to provide information as to the purpose for the request except to establish whether inspection and copying would violate…statute that exempts or prohibits disclosure of specific information or records to certain persons
• Facilities of the chief clerk and secretary must be made available to any person for the copying of legislative public records except when and to the extent that this would unreasonably disrupt the operations of the chief clerk or secretary
• No official format is required for making a records request

Section 107. RESPONSES

• The chief clerk and the secretary must promptly respond to requests for legislative public records (and on and on with ways and formats to accomplish)
• Additional time required to respond may be based on need to clarify intent, locate and assemble information, notify affected persons, time, resources, personnel constraints
• Secretary or the chief clerk may ask the requester to clarify what information the requester is seeking
• If the requester fails to respond to a request to clarify the request, and the entire request is unclear, the secretary or the chief clerk need not respond to it
• Denials must be in written statement of the specific reasons
• Chief clerk or the secretary may deny a bot request that is one of multiple requests from the requester to the chief clerk or secretary within a twenty-four hour period
• Chief clerk or secretary may deny a request if determined  request made to harass or intimidate a legislator or legislative employee, threaten safety, assist criminal activity

Section 108. REVIEW

• Person whose request was denied may seek review

Section 109. PROTECTION—ACCESS—ARCHIVING

• Secretary and chief clerk shall establish reasonable procedures…shall provide for the fullest assistance to inquirers and the most timely possible action on requests for information
• Procedures adopted for access to and preservation of legislative public records must be consistent with the archiving duties of the chief clerk and the secretary under chapter 40.14 RCW (PRESERVATION AND DESTRUCTION OF PUBLIC RECORDS)
• Chief clerk and secretary establish retention schedules for records not covered by RCW 40.14
• Records sent to the state archivist are subject to access laws governing state archives
• If a legislative public records request is made at a time when such record exists but is scheduled for destruction in the near4future, the secretary or the chief clerk shall retain possession of the record, and may not destroy or erase the record until the request is resolved

Section 110. FEES

Impose reasonable fee for photocopies, scanning, storage media used to transmit, etc.

Section 111. DISCLAIMER OF LIABILITY

Legislative branch and its houses, members, employees, and agencies are not liable, and no cause of action exists, for any loss or damage based upon the release of a legislative public record if the entity releasing the record acted in good faith in attempting to comply with the provisions of this chapter (if it gets this far, a judge figures it out)

Section 112. DUTY TO DISCLOSE OR WITHHOLD

Does not affect duty to disclose or withhold under other laws

Section 113. LEGISLATIVE OVERSIGHT COMMITTEES

Nothing in this chapter gives the executive rules committee oversight authority over any senators, senate employees, or committee of the senate, nor does it give the facilities and operations committee oversight authority over house members, house employees, or any committee of the house of representatives (there are provisions for this elsewhere)

Section 114. CODIFICATION

This act is a new chapter Title 44 in RCW (important for reading the following)

(From here down is basically housekeeping changes of other sections)

Section 115.

Statute law committee and the office of the code reviser are agencies governed by RCW 44

Section 116.

Legislative ethics board is an agency governed by RCW  44

Section 117.

Joint transportation committee is an agency governed by RCW 44

Section 118.

The redistricting commission is an agency governed by RCW 44

Section 119.

The joint legislative audit and review committee is an agency governed by RCW 44

Section 120.

Committee on pension policy and the office of the state actuary are agencies governed by RCW 44

Section 121.

Joint legislative evaluation and accountability program committee is an agency governed by RCW 44

Section 122.

Joint legislative systems administrative committee is an agency governed by RCW 44

Section 123.

Office of legislative support services is an agency governed by RCW 44

PART II

PUBLIC RECORDS ACT—CLARIFIED TO EXCLUDE LEGISLATIVE BRANCH—CONFORMING AMENDMENTS TO CHAPTER 42.56 RCW

Sections 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207 208 amend RCW 42.56… to make perfectly clear that the legislature is governed by RCW 44

PART III

Section 301. SEVERABILITY

If any part is found invalid, the rest remains in effect

Section 302. APPLICATION

Curative, remedial, and retroactive, and applies to all records requests and lawsuits under chapter 42.56 RCW pending as of the effective date of this section.

Section 303.

This act is necessary for the immediate preservation of the public peace, health, or safety, or support of the state government and its existing public institutions, and takes effect immediately.

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That’s it in a nutshell (granted, it’s like coco de mer, the world’s largest nut, but a nutshell nonetheless).

Next step? Who knows? It might cost us a lot or more than that in tax dollars and personal grief to find out.

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Thos

“And please don’t blame the activist for sitting on the train track.”

Why not? The way to limit production is to limit consumption. I have had this argument with lots of activists.

Corporations will continue to make whatever they can sell. Use less is the way to prevent making. Attempting to stop production when there is demand is almost fruitless. Why not demonstrate at gas stations? Why not demonstrate at SUV dealers? Why not protest car-oriented urban sprawl? Why not protest car-oriented malls? The amount of the US that is paved for parking is about the size of Rhode Island, 1,200 square miles.

Invading refineries or corporate offices, turning valves (which can lead to an explosion), and blocking railroad tracks is so much more hip. Why not block streets, roads, interstates, and runways? Oh…those only represent using the oil and they’re dangerous.

Brave is not as much as foolish. A train uses 10% of the energy because it has 10% of the friction between the wheel and the rolling surface. That also means it takes a long time to stop. A “brave” activist in California a few decades ago learned that the hard way when he lay on the track in front of a slow moving weapons train that “should have stopped.” Well…it couldn’t and he lost his legs. How about the engineer that couldn’t get it stopped? Is he merely sacrificed for the cause? Read up on what running over people does to engineers. They can expect to kill at least four people over the course of a career. A former colleague stopped counting at 27. He stopped getting off the engine to see about the person(s) who got hit (some on foot, some in vehicles). He got to consuming a lot of Seagram’s VO to deal with life. One guy hit the breaking point at after that last fatal just got off the engine in the middle of nowhere and walked away. No, he didn’t come back to the railroad. How about the firefighters and paramedics who need to try to put Humpty Dumpty back together in some meaningful way? I worked with one who finally couldn’t take the emotional trauma of so frequently being powerless to keep life in the body. Are they sacrificed for the cause too? Oh, maybe causing a derailment is fun. Yes, an emergency rate braking application at low speed can derail a train. Go for it.

“Without good mass transit it is very difficult for the necessary numbers of activists to get themselves to the train tracks at the right time due to the fluidity of many direct actions. ”

Let’s see…the legislature just lowered car license tab fees because of car/truck/SUV owner complaints. That may or may not reduce the extent of ST3. Do we see anybody protesting against lowering the license fees? Oh…that isn’t sexy like scaling fences, cutting chains, and camping on railroad tracks.

How about a train trip of 2 hours 30 minutes every hour between Seattle and Portland, 2 hours 45 minutes Seattle – Vancouver BC bi-hourly. It’s a 20 year program that will be in service in 2018…oh…this is 2018. It wasn’t funded, was it? Oh well. Clamoring for that…nope.

I have mentioned my oil train content list to activists who have bristled at the thought that I might be blaming their habits for oil trains. Some have been hostile. A German colleague told me that it seems that Americans can’t entertain themselves without gasoline.

In Europe, one can get along just fine without a car. In the times that I have visited Europe, I have been in a taxi once (because my Bulgarian colleague and I managed to get lost in Zurich at 3am) and in a car once (the conversation with the professor I was visiting became too engaged; the university was a 30 minute walk from the station and he realized that my train was going to leave in 15 minutes). Other than that, it’s been walking and trains. My friend in Braunschweig Germany doesn’t drive. He doesn’t have a license. He doesn’t need it. How does that happen? How about gasoline at 6-8 bucks a gallon and a tax on vehicle CO2 and other emissions in addition to registration fees? Nope, that won’t fly here. When the price gets to be over $3 per gallon, there is loud demand for the US government to do something about it. Either we invade another little country to defend and stabilize our oil under their dirt, or we tap the strategic reserve to flood the market and lower the price. Is anybody protesting that? Nope.

A couple of decades ago, there was a suggestion that a one cent per gallon addition to the federal gasoline tax, dedicated to Amtrak, could bring Amtrak into about the 50s…maybe the 60s level of service. That was a non-starter. Were there protests? No. There was relief at not having to pay another penny per gallon.

Long ago, there was a state five cent additional tax per gallon of gasoline, dedicated to transportation. If I remember correctly, highways got $14 billion. Rail projects got $250 million The highway folks insisted that it was their money that had been stolen and repeatedly tried to find ways to get it. Anybody protest that? Nope.

The US military is the entity that has the largest oil consumption in the world. Is anyone protesting that? We’re lucky to have anyone merely protesting war, let alone the military’s oil consumption. That’s unpatriotic. The brave soldiers are defending our freedom. By maintaining and enlarging an empire? No they are contributing to the collapse.

Export coal going to China (which generates protest) makes the electricity for the cheap plastic stuff that comes back to fill the shelves of Walmart and such (which does not). The manufacturing jobs precede or follow the coal. People flock to Walmart (where employees get public assistance to survive) to get the best price, then can’t figure out why there is so much unemployment and homelessness. Of course, they won’t pay extra to buy something that is well made here (if you can even find it any more…but I’ll settle for well made in Germany, Spain, etc.). Then the cheap plastic junk that is the product of oil and coal gets ditched because it is junk. Then folks buy more to replace it. There doesn’t seem to be protest over that cycle…except a cursory protest over Walmart coming to town…sometimes.

Need a couple of #10×2″ screws to finish up a repair or project? Go on down to the store to get…ten of them in a plastic bag. The little baggie is useless for anything else, so it is ditched – hopefully in one of the plastic bag recycle boxes. Does anybody protest that? Nope. You can be sure, though, that no terrorist put germs into your bag of eight too many screws. I was working a gig on the road and found that I forgot my utility knife. I needed one and had to go to a hardware store to get it. There was a choice of several.They all had packaging. Some had PACKAGING. I bought the one that had the least packaging and I still needed a knife to open the package so that I could use the knife! Does anybody protest that wasteful use of oil? (Short answer: Nope.)

Folks feel so smugly good (except the ones who resent having to do it) about recycling. Let’s see…buy throwaway packaging. Throw it in a bin. The diesel (or CNG, we protest both) truck picks it up and pours it all into a big pile in the truck. The truck drives to a facility to be dumped into a bigger pile. The pile is sorted into material types with the aid of a diesel front end loader. The front end loader than loads the various piles into diesel trucks to be hauled to a facility of some sort to re manufacture the stuff in some way. Oh, the bulk of it goes to China (one of the largest exports of the US is garbage) in a diesel ship. Ah, but we recycle. We’re being so ecologically friendly. Is anyone protesting that cycle of oil use…uh, no.

Nope, as a society, and even as environmental activists, we want oil production to stop and don’t want to protest the egregious useless consumption that causes the production.

There was a protest blocking the railroad in Olympia to protest the shipment of fracking sand…but there was no shipment of fracking sand. Other things were blocked, but that’s just the cost of protesting. I’ve got it! If trains are so evil, let’s use trucks. One railroad car holds about four semi trailers and it takes a tenth of the energy to move it…but we need to block shipments because some trains might have oil production related shipments. Decades ago, the folks in Bellingham were so happy when the daily train of rock to the cement factory went away. The railroad was bankrupt and couldn’t stay in business (the days when the federal government was actually competing against the railroad industry at the same time as applying destructive economic regulation. Yay government, go get those evil profiteering robber baron railroads-except that part was 100 years previous). Hooray for our side! Oh…then the cement factory needed 180 trucks of stone a day to keep up production and stay in business. They protested and protested and protested. Those trucks shouldn’t be using our streets! They won. The cement factory closed. Oh…all the jobs in the neighborhood went away. How did that happen?

It’s easy to blame all of this on capitalism. Personal responsibility is not a really big thing in the US. No matter what happens, it is obviously someone else’s fault.

I’m all for those brave protesters actually being brave and protesting against what needs to be protested against and protesting for what needs to be supported.

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Thos