By JIM BARON

PROVIDENCE — The often-maligned General Assembly has at least one friend: Secretary of State Ralph Mollis.

Mollis issued an Access 2008 “report card” on the legislature’s voluntary adherence to the state Open Meetings Law (OML) this week, giving lawmakers straight “A’s” in living up to the spirit of the law. The Senate also received an “A” for complying with the letter of the law, while the House of Representatives scored high in the “B” range for that category.
While there were 83 violations of the letter of the law, the secretary of state’s office found, the spirit of the law was never violated, not even once. The report card graded the activities of House, Senate and Joint committees, but did not pass judgment on floor sessions of the full House or Senate.
Mollis spokesman Chris Barnett said spirit of the law violations “are reserved for instances which appear to be intentionally misleading to the public.” He cited as examples the discontinued practice of having “continuous calendars,” when a long list of bills would be posted for a hearing without specifying the day or time when any particular bill would be heard. Another example, he said, would be posting an agenda with a lengthy list of legislation that could not possibly be heard at a single committee session.
Letter of the law violations, Barnett explained, concern committee meetings held with less than the 48 hours notice required by the OML.
The General Assembly is exempt from the OML, so any compliance is strictly voluntary on the legislature’s part. The annual access reports are intended to compare the assembly’s voluntary compliance with provisions of the law that applies to virtually all public bodies at the state and local level.
The high grades the House and Senate have been given in recent years are a far cry from the original 1997 report, titled “Access Denied: Chaos, Confusion and Closed Doors.”
That study, issued by then Secretary of State Jim Langevin, detailed that 52 percent of all legislative committee meetings would have ran afoul of the OML and that 236 bills, some concerning major issues, were heard in committee without advanced notice that would allow the public to attend or speak on the measures. Langevin is now the congressman from the state’s 2nd District.
“To their credit, the House and the Senate made more than a good-faith effort to keep the public apprised of their work last year, even though compliance with the Open Meetings law is completely voluntary on their part,” Mollis said in a letter accompanying the report. “Overall, both chambers of the General Assembly continued their commendable performance in 2008.
Mollis notes that the intent of the OML is to ensure that “public business be performed in a open and public manner and that the citizens be advised of and aware of the performance of public officials and the deliberations and decisions that go into the making of public policy.”
“My priority,” he adds, “is to use technology to make government more open and accessible. The way people receive information has changed dramatically since the access report was conceived.”
The General Assembly, which did not even have a Web site in 1997, now posts its meeting notices online. That simple improvement has enhanced the public’s access to its work.
The worst grade, the only “D,” was scored by the House Separation of Powers Committee, which held one-third of its meetings (two of the total six) without proper notice.
The House Municipal Government Committee and the House Environmental and Natural Resources Committee each received a grade of “C.” One-fourth of the environmental committee’s meetings would have violated the OML, as would 28 percent of the municipal government panel’s sessions.
Virtually every one of the violations noted in the report happened in the hectic home stretch of the legislative session, the final week before adjournment, when the lion’s share of the bills are passed in any given year.
Many of the violations occurred in the last days of the session, which stretch into the night or even the following morning. At those times, floor sessions recess so the committees can convene to resurrect bills that were thought dead, or rework legislation found to have errors or that were amended in the opposite chamber.
Bills that have been the stuff of headlines for months often die quietly during that period, while other proposals that had barely seen the light of day all session suddenly zoom through committees and become law, or at least go to the governor for his signature or veto.
Some committees seemed to have been able to evade the criteria of the report.
The Joint Committee on Legislative Services, for instance, which deals with the business and personnel operations of the General Assembly, got a 100 percent grade for complying with both the spirit and the letter of the law. It held one meeting and posted it 48 hours or more in advance. But decisions were made throughout the year that should have required meetings or votes of the panel, which comprises the speaker of the House, the Senate President, the majority and minority leaders of the House and the minority leader of the Senate. The joint committee did not meet at all in 2007 but decisions somehow got made.
The report is not structured to recognize that type of irregularity.