I enjoy the legislative session because it’s the occasion for a flood of reports submitted by various agencies and programs. It’s a festival of useful data. Copies used to be stacked up in legislators’ offices, but now they’re reduced to links to electronic copies, officially conveyed in the series of Governor’s Messages.

Having easy electronic access should be good news for the public but, in practice, the system is broken. I have to wonder whether anyone ever even glances at those messages, which are simply transmittal letters accompanying a couple of copies of each report, along with the URL where electronic versions can be found.

All too often the links don’t work.

For example, from GM 24:

The provisions in Act 192, section 5, require the Employees’ Retirement System to provide an annual report to the Legislature regarding its direct holdings in companies that provide significant practical support for genocide activities being conducted by the Sudanese government in the Darfur region. The report is to include a summary of correspondence with companies engaged by the public fund; all investments sold, redeemed, divested, or withdrawn; all prohibited investments; and, any progress made. You may also electronically view the report at http://hawaii.gov/budget/LegReports/ pursuant to Act 231, Session Laws of Hawaii 2001.

That link takes you right to this error message:

We’re sorry, but that page doesn’t exist…

In this particular case, the error was easy to spot. Remove the capitalization and the link works.

Sometime shortly after the first of the year, there must have been a new person assigned to churning out these Governor’s Messages from the standard template.
Now a generic spacefiller, “http://hawaii.gov/agency”, appears in the message, but it now used an embedded URL to get to the correct report.

For example, if you open GM 104, the visible link, “http://hawaii.gov/agency” actually takes you to “http://hawaii.gov/health/about/pr/publication.html”, a list of Health Department reports.

But later Governor’s Messages failed to insert that underlying link, so the generic “agency” link takes you directly to a generic error.

Site Error

An error was encountered while publishing this resource.

Resource not found

Sorry, the requested resource does not exist.
Check the URL and try again.

The Legislative Reference Bureau maintains its own links to departmental and agency reports, but unless you know where a program is lodged for administrative purposes, you won’t be able to find the report.

For example, GM 175 transmits the report of the Annual Report of the Crime Victim Compensation Commission. The link doesn’t work, but it does refer to the LRB Library. So I tried the LRB’s list of agency reports, but it doesn’t list the commission. If you search and go directly to the commission’s web site, and click under “Links,” you’ll find annual reports. Unfortunately, the latest one shown is for 2001. So the current report transmitted by GM 175 remains unavailable.

What we’re left with is what appears to be a robust system for making government information available to the public which fails to deliver on its promise.

I hope that Gov. Abercrombie’s proposed Chief Information Officer will be able to get the system up and running, and agencies giving it their full support and cooperation.