An affront to open government

Everybody knows football is close to a religion here in the South, and it doesn’t take a lot of proselytizing or evangelizing to bring most Southerners into the fold. A lot of us seem to have been born with a passion for football hard-wired into our DNA.

We also know competition for talent, especially among major college programs, is fierce and sometimes dirty. Hard-core fans are willing to overlook a few cut corners in the recruiting process, especially if the program cutting the corners is our own team of choice — but, to a surprising degree, we’re sometimes willing to shrug off a few transgressions on the part of our rivals. Whatever things we might be naïve about, football ain’t one of them.

But sidestepping a few NCAA strictures (especially given how ridiculous so many of them are) is one thing. Stomping on the principle (not to mention the practice) of open government for the less-than-lofty purpose of giving the state’s college sports programs a competitive boost is something else entirely.

That’s pretty much what the Georgia General Assembly did in the closing days of the session, with a little-noticed (at first) rider the House tacked onto Senate Bill 323, an economic development confidentiality measure.

SB 323 should already have been an eyebrow-raiser even before the House tinkered with it. It would exempt from open records laws information about major economic development projects. Government accountability watchdogs are concerned this expansion would let any state office or agency use a claim of potential job creation to shield all kinds of agreements and contracts from legitimate public scrutiny.

But some in the House took it further, and into a different realm of “economic development.”

The version passed last week would give athletic associations and departments at Georgia public colleges and universities 90 days — yes, three months — to respond to open records requests. Current law requires at least an acknowledgement of the request within three business days, although reasonable consideration of how long the requested information takes to assemble is taken into account.

Under this bill — which would cover Columbus State University athletics as well as Division I football powerhouse programs at the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech — information on such taxpayer-subsidized expenses as athletic budgets and expenditures would be exempt from any reasonable definition of timely reporting.

Rep. Earl Ehrhart, R-Powder Springs, told the Macon Telegraph that the bill “just allows us to play on the same field as Alabama and everybody else.”

As an observation about government accountability, that’s probably not destined to be immortalized with a plaque on the Capitol grounds.

Georgia First Amendment Foundation director Hollie Manheimer noted that no other state agency “is given 90 days to conduct its business in secret.”

Regardless of how sacred football might be in Georgia, Gov. Nathan Deal has already decided to veto one piece of religion-related legislation. This should be the next.

This story was originally published March 28, 2016 at 5:59 PM with the headline "An affront to open government."