They will never make it easy for us to check up on them unless they are forced to do so.

Here’s the Senate link HT’s to BuffaloGeek.
Snubbing the public
The Senate makes its member item data difficult to access and hard to analyze

Leave it to the Legislature to give reform a bad name. Just weeks ago, after losing a court case brought by this newspaper, Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver agreed to disclose the names of lawmakers who sponsored so-called member items, which individual lawmakers typically disburse to organizations and causes in their home districts.

But then, in a sleight of hand all too typical of Albany, there was a catch. Yes, the information is all there on the Senate and Assembly Web sites, just as the leaders promised. But try making any sense out of it.

Here’s what happened: The Legislature released the data in so-called PDF format, which can usually be scanned by other software to organize the information and allow viewers to search through some 3,000 pages of text. But in this case, the PDF provided only images of text, not the text itself. That made access to specific lawmakers’ member items especially difficult. The Senate, meanwhile, added another obstacle by embedding a secret password that makes its files even harder to penetrate.

At least the Assembly was shamed into quickly reversing itself. When told that this newspaper was prepared to go back to court to get access to pure data, not images of text, the Assembly staff quickly provided the information in searchable files. Now it will be possible for the public to easily determine which lawmaker doled out member item money to a specific group or organization.

But the Senate is another matter. “Our understanding is that this is all you’re entitled to,” Senate spokesman John McArdle told our senior investigations editor Bob Port. “Bottom line, that’s all you’re going to get.”

No, the bottom line is that Mr. McArdle, and Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, R-Brunswick, are making a mockery of the public’s right to know.

Liam Arbetman, a researcher for the public interest group Common Cause, sums it up perfectly. “Essentially, what they’ve done is provide … stone etching,” he says of the Senate. “They’re trying to take the freedom out of the information. It’s like they they don’t want you to be able to use it.”

But why? If member items are supposed to serve a good purpose — namely, helping out worthy groups and causes throughout the state — why the need for any secrecy? Isn’t that something each lawmaker should be proud of?

The Senate, after all, was the first to announce that it would comply with the court’s disclosure order rather than appeal. So why is it making things so difficult now? Or is there something to hide?