Making government open

The next few months promise to be interesting as far as the public's right to know about government is concerned. On the one hand, a legislative task force will hold its final meeting today to consider whether to recommend draconian changes to the state's open records law, ending scrutiny of some of government's inner workings. On the other hand, a lawmaker is proposing changes to the open meetings law that would require local governments to be more transparent or face criminal charges.

In the middle of this mixed bag comes the state Procurement Policy Board, which is considering whether the public should have access to information about the losing bids in requests for proposals on state projects. The state currently allows access to information about the losers of traditional bids, which are awarded solely on price. This, however, would involve cases in which the state outlines a project or a problem and asks professionals to submit bids outlining their best solutions. Often, these bids include some proprietary information.

Surprisingly, the opposition to making this public is coming mainly from state and local government officials, not from the professionals themselves. As reported in this newspaper, the board surveyed suppliers and found that 57 percent of them wouldn't mind making losing bids public, while almost 66 percent said such a move wouldn't scare them away from submitting proposals, provided there were rules in place for protecting proprietary information.

Among state and local officials, however, 60 percent opposed making the information public, and 53 percent said it would hurt the procurement process.

It's hard to know how to interpret those results, except to say that government officials seem more hung-up about transparency than the private-sector folks who have the most to lose. Perhaps public officials worry about the extra time or effort that might be involved if particularly sensitive information has to be removed before bids are made public.

Without question, private business needs the freedom to make strategies and creatively pursue projects without giving those secrets away to competitors. Just as important, however, is the public's need to see for itself that the procurement process is clean and above-board. The public, after all, is paying the bills.

We're pleased the Procurement Policy Board is leaning toward greater openness, even if that takes the form of only ranking the submissions in order of acceptance. Unlike the other open-government proposals mentioned earlier, this one won't require approval from lawmakers or the governor. The board itself has the authority to make changes.

Government should always operate under the assumption that everything it does is open to the public, unless a good reason dictates otherwise. That would be a good standard for all public officials to apply.