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Thursday, March 18, 2004

Indiana Law - More on HEA 1285, the PERF Bill

Today is the final day Governor Kernan has to act on HEA 1285 (the bill that would make all PERF information confidential except for member name and years of service). He may sign it, he may veto it, or he may allow it to become law without his signature.

The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette has an editorial this morning that concludes:

This is not the way public policy should be made. If there are privacy issues related to PERF information, they must be openly debated through the legislative process, not the back-door means of a second-reading amendment. Kernan should reserve his first veto as governor for this bill. Funds with $10 billion in public assets must not be veiled in secrecy.
Ruth Holladay's column in the Indianapolis Star today concludes:
HEA 1285 is a crummy bill that was rushed through and will make bad law. If Kernan vetoes it, he deserves applause for doing the right thing. He can still tell legislators to come back next year with a smarter bill.
This set me to thinking - what might be an answer here? Recall this information from the front-page Star story of March 15th:
The individual pension records of more than 200,000 public employees are already confidential. That law was passed in 2001. At issue are the approximately 11,800 members of five smaller funds, which cover prosecutors, judges, legislators and some law enforcement officers.
So signing HEA 1285 would simply compound a situation created by the 2001 legislation. Vetoing HEA 1285 would be the start to a solution, and would directly address the most egregious provision of HEA 1285 -- the language that makes it retroactive to Sept. 1, 2003, cutting the legs out from under two pending media requests for information that was then, and is today, public, but that has been withheld by PERF, apparently awaiting final action on HEA 1285.

The next step would be a public review of how to balance the public's right to know how its government (in this case, PERF) is operating, against the need to maintain the security of certain information such as social security numbers, and perhaps addresses and dates of birth. (The Indiana Supreme Court's Indiana Task Force on Access to Court Records has just accomplished a similar review. The results may be found here, in the revisions to Indiana Administrative Rule 9.)

The final step would be to draft and enact a measure that would apply to all PERF records, would start with the presumption of open public access inherent in the Indiana Public Records Law, and would impose only those limitations determined to be absolutely necessary. (Perhaps this measure also would discourage agency foot-dragging in fulfilling public records' requests.)

Posted by Marcia Oddi on March 18, 2004 07:14 AM
Posted to Indiana Law