Dysfunctional Right to Know Legislative Advisory Committee‏

N.B.  PDF attached preserves formatting and includes good graphics and all of the footnotes.d 

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I. Dysfunctional Right to Know Legislative 

Advisory Committee

Right to Know Advisory Committee

State House

Augusta, Maine

Dwight Hines

March 3, 2014

Odd, most days when I get up the stairs, I expect to see Ken Curtis or James Longley.  But they aren’t here anymore.  When I turn the corner to head into the Legislative Library, I expect to see Senator Minette Cummings and Senator Joe, sitting at a table across from each other, pushing things that look like raisins along an imaginary line.  I’m just there to get or give her a printout full of numbers — on a good day, a day after a weekend when the university in Orono let me run my data on the weekend because it was too much, too big for Orono’s IBM Sierra mainframe to run during the week (1), numbers that she would look at like they were her prize orchids growing, “Look at them smile”, she’d say while we stood on the front porch of her island house built by a family of rich dwarfs.   But I never interrupted her and Senator Sewell, they were too intense and just watching and listening to them moving raisins, then scribbling on the back of an LD, then murmuring back and forth too quick for me to catch all the word shapes held my attention better than a slow cooking fresh blueberry pie.  What they were doing was a semi- quasi- qualitative multiple regression — though they never called it that — using raisins as indicators of groups of people who would be impacted by the details of the bill that the Democrat and the Republican they were (2) were hammering and chiseling and twisting and cajoling into near form shadows that went outside normal dimensions.  It was a classical mini-max calculus problem — though they never called it that — but deep, deep enough that someday, when computers got more powerful you’d be able to run these very human problems, problems that had to be optimized for alleviating pain without inflicting damages or distress in those unaware of how valued they were by the Senators.  They did it, and not once did they call what they were doing statistics or calculations or even figuring, or just working for their people.  I still sense them there, or off in one of the small rooms, Senator Joe humming to himself as he tried different fits, different structures Senator Cummings nodding slow yes or brief no.   Often, I couldn’t wait to see the form, the architecture, the Gestalt they created, a figure-ground that would be warm and happy in a fine art museum.  Mr. Sunstein, who knows about the freedom of information top-down and spinning and in qubits, knew and approved of what the Senators were doing, and has explained it to the rest of us in “Nonsectarian Welfare Statements”, “A central question is whether they [institutions, RTK committees] are helping a nation’s [Maine’s] citizens to live good lives.” (3).  If they are not helping, they be dysfunctional.

Then, all alone, without the canopy of the old ones, it’s today, right now and I can’t hear Governor Longley, and he was always heard, even when he couldn’t be seen, and I’II walk into the Joint Judiciary Committee room, into a Committee that is not just arithophobic but innumerate, lacking even the gentle rocking back and forth of the elected Rabbis who knew that numbers, little and big, blue, green, orange and lavender, moderately sprinkled with hard potato facts were their guide, the light on the path they needed to do their sacred jobs.  In ‘63 and ‘64, those Rabbis were everywhere, thank God.

The Right to Know Legislative Advisory Committee, with only one elected Representative, Kimberly Monaghan-Derrig, and only one elected Senator, Linda M. Valentino, is not data driven, is not best evidence based and has biases almost as deep and warpled as the ugly green ones I saw in the Louisiana Capitol, in Baton Rouge, in 1963.  A sad time that fresh gumbo couldn’t set right. Information was not recognizable, and logic and reason were lost in the sheets that scrawny men wore as they shuffled in slow, white buzzard circles.  My mother would have said their wives don’t think much of their husbands, letting them go out like that in unwashed, wrinkled up and rumpled old sheets.  Representative Monaghan-Derrig said not a word, not a sigh or shriek.  Senator Valentino, in a strong voice, that let you know she would not tolerate laziness, said we are going to get us an expert in information technology.

The RTK committee gave me more quotes to use than will fit on this page or the next.  Like when Harry Pringle, appointed by the Governor to represent the school system bellowed, “We don’t want parents’ emails being found using the Maine Right to Know Act because all someone needs to get into your bank account is your name and email address” (4).   Him saying that didn’t bother me but a little. The fact that no one corrected him, not even Percy Brown or Perry Antone, was proof my body and mind and soul were all in the wrong place.  Percy and Perry knew better but they ignored me eye-nudging them.

So a major theme of the right to know advisory committee was it maybe good for you to know, but you’re damned if you disagree.  Harry, maybe at a different meeting, maybe not, said that we needed to raise the charge that agencies and towns charge for processing and copying public records because “everything else has gone up so why shouldn’t information cost more too.”  No one disagreed, again, and then the raise was approved. [(5) with graphs to let you know the error sizes of his statement)]. There be ripples from vacuums like this that start slow, with a heavy amplitude sine wave that gains strength as it rolls out the door, down the hall and over to the Augusta Police Department, where they are unable to find the owner of a pickup truck when they have the license plate number, and the Chief, maybe bumped by that sine wave, maybe not, goes to the City Council and has them approve a charge of $25.00 for each police report someone requests, after the first one (6)  It’s sad the Augusta City Council thinks not of state law, or little of it, and builds on Mr. Pringle’s errors. (7)

A mildew scent comes into the RTK room that is too familiar because Harry Pringle doesn’t know how prices for computer hardware and software over the last ten years have dropped to levels that strain my economically challenged brain because as the prices have marched south, following General Sherman to and through Atlanta, the crank power, the amount and quality and speeds of volatile and fixable memory, all done with chips and mirrors, have gone north, past the pole and into the northern lights.  Yep, that old von Neumann slab of silicon, without morphing into non-von Neuman slabs, as some said was ordained by physical laws, by God, made Moore and Moore’s law answers to prayers of dollar struggling pointy-headed nerds.  Prayer answers that continue to defy economic gravity with their every 18 months doubling answers.

As I sit in the back of the room, taking page after page of notes to keep my attention on these folks and their crippled advice that the legislators are going to rely on for their law making decisions, I accept that no one on the RTK committee represents the ordinary citizen, the taxpayer, the one who is without resources when attempting to obtain information about his government.  My acceptance is soon verified and validated by Mr. Richard Flewelling, who tells another committee member sitting across the room, so it’s a loud telling, to be sure to give the RTK requesters only PDFs, not spreadsheet files.  In those words, which echo around in my ears, you know that a significant component, some democracy and governance specialists would say the most substantive component, of the RTK, the component that transforms the roles of the requester and the responder from US versus THEM, to We, is lost.  Barrier placement  between citizen and government, even when it requires extra work of the government, reminds me of how much effort the government spent in making some people sit in the back of the bus, and go to a completely separate, but not equal, school.  In those few words, a RTK Advisory member squint-narrowed the sharing of useful information to the community, the state, and the individual, without a single objection from the rest of the committee (8).

Footnotes

1) Computer Programs 200K or larger, with data, were too large to run during the week.  Today, my 3 year old MacIntosh MacBook Pro has 8 Gigabytes of volatile memory (RAM), one terabyte of hard memory, and a CPU with blister speeds of 2 GHz. 
2) The Senators were problem-solving driven, they knew there would be many years for them to discuss party affiliations and political differences after they solved the problems and created the opportunities for Mainers.  The Senators could have written Cass R. Sunstein’s, Incompletely Theorized Agreements in Constitutional Law, Public Law & Legal Theory Working Papers No. 147, 2007. <http://ssrn.com/abstract=957369>.
3)  Sunstein, C. Nonsectarian Welfare Statements. Preliminary Draft, 8/28/2013, Regulation & Governance, Symposium on Institutional Dysfunction.  
<http://ssrn.com/abstract=2317909>.
4) There was excitement when a newspaper reported that a “hacker’ had gotten into a school’s computer system and stolen all the email addresses of the parents.  The excitement tripled when the hacker sent the parents an email.  It then appeared that the hacker received the emails attached to an email the superintendent unknowingly sent to him.  But, it was too late.  Well, the RTK Advisory Committee, based on bad information, recommended to the legislature that school email addresses for parents be confidential.  I believe that law passed. “ except: E-mail addresses obtained by a political subdivision of the State for the sole purpose of disseminating noninteractive notifications, updates and cancellations that are issued from the political subdivision or its elected officers to an individual or individuals that request or regularly accept these noninteractive communications. [2013, c. 339, §3 (NEW).]”
5)  Ernst R. Berndt, Zvi Griliches, Neal Rappaport, Econometric Estimates of Prices Indexes for Personal Computers in the 1990s, NBER Working Paper No. 4549,August 1995.  <http://www.nber.org/papers/w4549.pdf>

In this paper we construct a number of quality-adjusted price indexes for personal computers in the U.S. marketplace over the 1989- 92 time period. We generalize earlier work by incorporating simultaneously the time, age and vintage effects of computer models into a fully saturated parameterization, and then develop a corresponding specification test procedure. While the simple arithmetic mean of prices of models by year reveals a price decline of about 11% per year, use of a matched model procedure similar to that commonly used by government statistical agencies generates a much larger rate of price decline -- about 20% per year. Since the matched model procedure holds quality constant, it ignores quality change embodied in new models. When data on new and surviving models are used in the estimation of hedonic price equations, a variety of quality-adjusted price indexes can be calculated, with varying interpretations. Although there are some differences, we find that on average these quality-adjusted price indexes decline at about 30% per year, with a particularly large price drop occurring in 1992. Parameters in hedonic price equations for desktop PC models differ from those for mobile PCs. Moreover, quality-adjusted prices fall at a slightly lower AAGR for mobile models (24%) than for desktops (32%). We conclude that taking quality changes into account has an enormous impact on the time pattern of price indexes for PCs.

SNIP  -- SEE ATTACHED PDF FOR GRAPHICS AND REMAINING FOOTNOTES.

 

   Dysfunctional Right to Know Legislative Advisory Committee