This spring, state legislators were asked to do a favor for Jack DeCoster, the Turner-based egg magnate. A bill sponsored by Rep. Dale Crafts (R-Lisbon) proposed to relieve Mr. DeCoster of the requirement to pay his workers minimum wage or overtime or to allow them to unionize. The proposal was later scaled back to nix only unioniziation, but it still represented a potential windfall to DeCoster’s egg companies, the only ones large enough to be affected by its provisions.
In their testimony before the legislature’s labor committee, Crafts, company officials and a labor lawyer hired to “investigate” their practices stated or implied that the companies had had a sterling record in Maine for 10 or 15 years, including inspections by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). OSHA and other regulators had established “an exemplary record of clean, safe and pleasant workplaces,” labor attorney Daniel W. Bates testified, while Crafts told his colleagues that “if there had been violations in the past 15 years, we would have heard about them.”
This testimony was entirely at odds with reality. A few minutes on the Internet reveals OSHA had fined DeCoster’s Maine operations numerous times over the past 10 years, including $344,000 in 2002 for serious safety violations, $108,500 in 2004 for “willful, repeat, and/or serious violations”, and $150,000 in 2008 for what an OSHA official described as a “disregard for basic, common-sense safety procedures and employee protections [that] is as astonishing as it is unacceptable.” In 2009, DeCoster agreed to pay over $125,000 in penalties and fees for animal cruelty, like letting live chickens slowly suffocate to death in trash cans filled with dead birds.
This should not have been a surprise to legislators. DeCoster’s companies-infamous throughout the country for triggering a salmonella outbreak last year that sickened over 1900 people-have a 40-year record of gross safety, health, environmental, labor and immigration violations in Maine, Iowa, Ohio and Maryland, resulting in literally millions of dollars in settlements. The rules Rep. Crafts was trying to repeal were put into place in 1975 and 1996 in response to horrific circumstances at Turner farms and associated worker housing, which made frontpage news at the time.
The lawmakers were trusting, perhaps, but they were not happy when they discovered they had been misled. “The testimony we received was not full and complete-we did not get the whole story,” the senate chair of the committee, Chris Rector (R-Thomaston), told me after my story in Down East revealed the apparent deceptions. His committee had by this time already approved the bill on a 7-6 party line vote, but Sen. Rector pledged to stop it from going forward. Apparently he succeeded: instead of voting on it, last month the senate sent it back to Rector’s committee for further contemplation.
But the episode exposed a shortcoming in the way the legislature handles the public testimony and other official submissions placed before its committees in an effort to sway lawmakers on the issues before them. None of it is put online, or even scanned so that it can be emailed to interested parties. Unless you’re willing to drive to Augusta, find the appropriate committee clerk, and make copies of these critical documents yourself-as I did while reporting the DeCoster story-there’s no way one can review these most public of documents to evaluate their merits or veracity.
Unlike pesky journalists, lawmakers themselves are often not in a position to check up on the facts they’ve been presented. “Unlike Congress, we don’t have much staff or research resource, so we are really depending on the testimony we receive on both sides of an issue when we consider it,” Sen. Rector said. If our legislators are to make their decisions based on sound information, making the testimony they hear accessible to the rest of us is of considerable importance.
So why isn’t it? After all, the copiers the clerks use to duplicate testimony on paper first scan the image into memory. Saving the images, turning them into a PDF, and posting them to the web is a simple process. Indeed, the committees of other legislative bodies from the U.S. Congress to the Portland City Council post such documentation all the time.
“That really is a time and resource issue,” says David Boulter, executive director of the State House’s Legislative Council, whose civil servants make things go for their elected bosses. “Typically there’s one staff person in the committee room who has to handle a lot of other issues. The principle purpose for people testifying is not to post it to the web, but to inform decision-makers.” That, he said, remains the top priority.
Change may be on the way. As it happens, the Republicans’ top two communications officials at the State House are both Internet-savvy. The House Speaker’s spokesman, Lance Dutson, is an Internet strategist who has run his own web design and marketing firm, and served as new-media strategist for Sen. Susan Collins and the Maine Republican Party. Scott Fish, the Senate president’s communications director, is the founder and longtime editor of As Maine Goes, the state’s most prominent conservative Internet forum. Neither is likely intimidated by the prospect of posting PDFs and they are in a good positions to encourage legislators to adopt this late-20th century innovation.
Indeed, Mr. Dutson says this has been very much on the radar. “It’s something that we talked about earlier in the session, and we didn’t get it done in the beginning, but there is a very low barrier to getting it done,” he says. “It would just be a matter of changing the process of how things are done.”
Mr. Boulter says no studies have been made as to what it might cost to set up the appropriate procedures, but notes that the volume of material is quite large: some 1600 bills a session, with testimony that can run into hundreds of pages. Additionally, some people give their testimony in person without a written submission, and the archiving of audio files of what they said could take up considerable server space. (At present, such testimony is streamed to the web-where third parties who happen to be tuned in can save it-but isn’t stored, even though it is a far simpler undertaking than the streaming itself.) “We’re increasingly doing more and more with the Internet,” he says. “We’ll be doing it, no question about it.”
Let’s hope so. It’ll make passing false information off on our elected representatives that much harder.
Colin Woodard is the author of three books, including The Lobster Coast. His fourth, American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, will be released in late September by Viking Press. www.colinwoodard.com