“I have far too many unanswered questions about the necessity and the intent of the proposal to support it just yet,” Sablan told the Variety.
She was asked by this reporter to comment on the bill, which was authored by Rep. Diego T. Benavente, R-Saipan.
The bill will penalize government employees for refusal or failure to comply with the measure.
“The timing of [the] bill is rather unfortunate,” she said, “since it follows a series of roadblocks thrown up by lawmakers themselves in the last year or so against efforts by concerned citizens to apply the Open Government Act to the Legislature. Indeed, several constituents have called and written to me to express their outrage that legislators should continue to exempt themselves from any transparency requirements, while beefing up transparency requirements for everyone else who works for the government.”
She said it’s “not clear to me yet how [the] proposal would be implemented. The bill says that any government employee who fails to comply with a lawmaker’s request for public records shall be held in contempt …. But who makes that determination of whether or not a person has failed to comply with a lawmaker’s request? The individual lawmaker? A presiding officer? The chair of an investigating committee who might possibly have jurisdiction over the issue being investigated? The attorney general? A judge? The bill in its present form is not entirely clear about that.”
Why, she asked, is this even an issue?
“Have lawmakers really found, as the bill states, that their requests for records from government agencies are too often ignored?” she said. “How often do lawmakers actually cite the Open Government Act in their requests for records? How often do legislative committees exercise their investigative powers — including their powers to subpoena witnesses and documents and hold people who refuse or fail to comply with these subpoenas in contempt?”
Sablan said she has “observed among many of my colleagues what I find to be a strange reluctance to exercise the powers that they already have as lawmakers – in which case, it is not clear to me that they would even exercise any expanded powers to compel documents and hold individuals in contempt for failure to comply.”
She said she would like to hear the views of the bill’s author, other lawmakers, government employees and members of the public.
