DES MOINES — A six-year battle in the Legislature to create an Iowa Public Information Board gets a renewed life, thanks to a new floor manager for the bill with a "strong desire" to move it forward.
"I think the time's come for this bill to move forward. Six years is long enough," State Rep. Walt Rogers, R-Cedar Falls, said Wednesday. "Iowans that I've talked to, talk about transparency in their government. . I think the common, everyday Iowan needs one place to go to find out some of their answers."
The board would add teeth to the state's open-records law.
Under Senate File 430, the state would create a seven-member board that would address people's questions and problems about access to government records and meetings, and seek enforcement of the state's open-records and public-meetings laws.
A member of a governmental body who violates the law could face civil penalties of between $1,000 and $2,500.
James Strohman, a former member of the three-member Story County Board, urged lawmakers to approve the bill.
Strohman talked about the frustration and difficulty he had as an elected official, serving on a board he believed "deliberately violated open-meetings laws continuously."
After being elected in 2006, Strohman said, he ran into "a little dictatorship," in which the two other board members essentially made all the decisions about Story County's $44 million budget, tax rates, 20 departments and 350 employees.
Strohman said he tried to teach his fellow board members about open-records and public-meetings law, and even brought in the executive director of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council, which advocates for open government, for a presentation.
"At the end of the presentation, one of the board members said, 'If we did all these things you said we should do, we couldn't conduct business,'" Strohman said. "There needs to be a mechanism for people to take things to a body and have them investigate something in an impartial way."
But Larry Pope, a lobbyist for Iowa League of Cities, which represents the state's 947 cities, and the Iowa Association of Municipal Utilities, which represents more than 550 municipal electric, gas, water and telecommunication utilities statewide, argued that the legislation would expand government.
While an amendment to the bill calls for hiring only one staff member for the new Iowa Public Information Board, Pope said the entity soon would need more resources.
"I see down the road a substantial state agency being created," Pope said. "I find it interesting in these tough times that you have a Legislature that is seriously considering creating a new bureaucracy and a new state agency."
Gov. Terry Branstad supports the bill. His office has proposed the amendment that would make the Iowa Public Information Board an independent agency in the Governor's Office, and would reduce the number of proposed new staff members from two to one.
"There currently does not exist an authoritative, single source where people from the public, from the local governments, from the regents and media can go and get answers to questions about what is open, what is not," said Bill Monroe, Branstad's special adviser for government transparency.
The Iowa Senate approved the bill last year, 49-0, but the Iowa House never debated it. State Rep. Kevin Koester, R-Ankeny, a school administrator who was the bill's Iowa House floor manager last year, said cost was the main sticking point.
Copyright ©2012 Omaha World-Herald®. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, displayed or redistributed for any purpose without permission from the Omaha World-Herald.
