COLUMN: Gov. Haley has chance to reclaim voice on transparency

It's been a rough few weeks for our transparency governor, from the discovery that her office was routinely deleting the sort of emails that most state employees understand they are legally required to keep - including a particularly embarrassing string of messages that one of her Cabinet agencies did keep, and turned over to The Post and Courier under a Freedom of Information Act request - to that cringe-inducing video of Gov. Nikki Haley staring silently at a pair of elevator doors while a reporter asked her about the contents of those messages.

The fact that other governors likewise hit delete more than they should have - Spartanburg's Herald-Journal reported last month that Mark Sanford's senior staffers dumped up to 20 gigabytes of official emails in the waning days of the administration - provided only the most transparent of fig leaves for the chief executive who was swept into office on a pledge of more open government.

But just before Christmas, Ms. Haley found her footing, announcing that her staff would work with the Department of Archives and History to update her records-retention policy, in what she termed "another major step toward transparency."

Never mind the motive; the disturbing fact is that no governor in 40 years had taken the Archives Department up on its offer to help update a woefully inadequate records-retention policy, and so all of Ms. Haley's predecessors had operated under ambiguous rules that left far too much to the whims of governors and their staffs. Ms. Haley promises a new policy this month, and though we can't judge it until we see it, indications are that it will indeed be a significant step toward openness. And for that she is to be commended.

The governor didn't actually acknowledge how hypocritical it was for her to maintain the old delete policy without question; as the architect of her transparency campaign, the S.C. Policy Council's Ashley Landess, put it, "When you run on a platform of fully open, transparent government, you better be the most open elected official at the table every time without exception." But it's still a relief that the governor would respond to widespread criticism by taking action to correct such a gross abuse, rather than trying to blame "that little girl" at The Post and Courier for asking her mean questions. We can only hope it will neutralize the growing resentment in the Legislature that her rules apply to everyone except her.

The one bizarre part of the governor's announcement was her call for a law requiring "mandatory annual training of all public records officers on records retention laws, regulations and guidelines." It's hard to argue with that, until you look at how little money the state has to undertake new initiatives. Then you recall that there haven't been any suggestions that other state agencies have a problem with record retention.

One official I talked to speculated that the governor was trying to claim credit for a government-wide record-retention renewal. Perhaps he's right, but if her training suggestion is in fact an attempt to use her own experience as a launching pad for broader openness initiatives, there are several other avenues more worthy of her time.

I'd start by tightening up the law that requires agencies to adopt retention policies for documents "of long term and enduring value" - a policy so vague that governors have been able to essentially ignore it. It's wonderful that Ms. Haley is creating a policy for her office that complies with the spirit of the law. It'd be better if we could ensure that she sticks to it, that her successor does the same and that any agencies that aren't in full compliance with the letter and spirit of the law get in compliance. That starts with defining "long term and enduring value" in state law, and continues with putting some teeth into the law that prohibits deleting those records. Archives Director Eric Emerson said his agency has never pursued criminal prosecution for violators.

Speaking of teeth, you can't talk about open-government non-compliance without discussing cities, counties and school districts, which have a much harder time than state agencies complying with the law. Few weeks pass without a violation somewhere in the state - last week's being Columbia's refusal to release maps that show where sexually oriented businesses could locate under its new business-license ordinance. Because a lawyer had been involved in drawing the maps, the city cited attorney-client privilege - an excuse that a unanimous state Supreme Court ripped to shreds this spring in a local government case out of the Lowcountry.

There are several ways to improve local-government compliance with open-government laws, and the governor would do well to get behind one or two of them. Or all of them. And if she's looking for someone who needs annual training in these matters, cities, counties and school districts would be a better target than state agencies.

Finally, there's the shield of secrecy behind which legislative correspondence is hidden.

The open-records law that makes nearly all executive-branch correspondence public exempts all legislative correspondence - as many people learned during the 2010 gubernatorial campaign, when reporters were able to review some of then-Rep. Haley's House emails only after the political pressure for her to try to prove a negative became too much for her to bear. As sensationalistic as that whole episode was, though, there was no serious attempt this past year to close that loophole.

Yes, legislators will think this seems a lot like meddling, and perhaps the governor isn't the best one to tackle it. But surely some of those legislators who have been tut-tutting Ms. Haley's email-deletion policy should be able to divert their gaze from the ugly speck in the governor's eye long enough to realize the damage being inflicted by the log in their own, and get to work on extricating it.