State Representative Janice Arnold-Jones, R-Albuquerque, deserves some sort of first amendment award for her bold web casting of a Jan. 25 House Taxation and Revenue committee meeting. Rep. Ed Sandoval, D, Albuquerque and Rep. Ben Lujan, D-Nambé, deserve a raspberry.
While Arnold-Jones was trying to inform the public what a public body was doing, Sandoval and Lujan were blasting her for it.
The state senate voted 27-13 in the 2008 legislative session to allow web-casting of senate committee hearings. These meetings are better than Valium as a sleep aid.
Web-casting such an event is a great start to doing the public’s business in public. Anyone can walk into these meetings and should they find a chair, sit down. Both the senate and house do a good job of discouraging public attendance, much less participation. They rarely start on time, twinkle in and out of quorum status and allow long-winded blow-hards to pontificate on matters few know anything about. But that never stops a politician from speaking.
Forty-seven states in the Unites States allow such streaming of meetings. Currently you can listen to some of the senate and house proceedings on different radio stations and web simulcasts.
The problem with the approval of web-casting is that first, the senate immediately broke its own rule and did not web cast any meetings and secondly, it should not require a memorial to broadcast a public meeting. The public can sit in the meetings, participate in the meetings, take pictures in the meetings but legislators don’t want them web cast.
Legislators’ arguments against keeping with their own vote?
• We don’t look good on television. No they don’t. Few people do. The ones who do make big money looking good. But that’s not why legislators are in Santa Fe. They’re there to represent constituents, handle the budget and pass good laws and correct bad ones.
• We’ll say something stupid. Yes, you will. Whether you’re on camera or not, you’re going to say something stupid. It usually turns into a quote of the day in the big city dailies for everyone to read.
• We might say something that can be used against us by our opponents in the next election. See previous paragraph.
This is supposed to be the year the legislature tackles some serious ethics issues. So far that hasn’t happened. Not allowing public access via the web or even cable television is unethical in itself.
Disseminating a web cast would allow the public to view their legislators in the comfort of their own home instead of pacing the halls of the roundhouse waiting for enough legislators to grace us with their presence so a meeting can start (once a quorum appears).
Let’s all put our big-boy pants on and do the right thing here. Your public servants. Act like you want the public to know what you’re doing.
Ms. Arnold-Jones does have to take a demerit for her comment, “Sometimes you have to do what’s right for the citizens.”
Sometimes?