During the 26 years I worked for the Bangor Daily News, I witnessed revolutionary changes in the way newspapers worked.

Today I travel to community newspapers around the country, installing computer software which allows these publications to process even more information from even more sources. While newspaper technology may have changed, the press is still in the same business: that of gathering information, processing it, and making it available to the public.

The concept that government business is public business is what makes America stand apart from most other nations in the world. It goes part and parcel with our First Amendment right to free speech.

Yet for many years in Maine, the business of the government has been the business of the public only when it’s not been the business of the legislature.

LD 718, An Act to Open to Public Scrutiny the Workings of the Maine Legislature, sponsored by Rep. Joseph Brooks, D-Winterport, would change that.

The bill would repeal from the state’s Right-to-Know statute the paragraph which exempts from public inspection “Records, working papers and interoffice and intraoffice memoranda used or maintained by any Legislator, legislative agency or legislative employee to prepare proposed Senate or House papers or reports for consideration by the Legislature or any of its committees during the biennium in which the proposal or report is prepared.”

LD 718, doesn’t create any new rules. I doesn’t strengthen or weaken any provisions of the Right-to-Know law. It doesn’t impose any unfunded mandates. All it does is remove the cloak of exemption under which the legislature has been hiding since the Right-to-Know law was first put in place.

There’s a saying that the two things the public shouldn’t be allowed to watch being made are sausage and legislation. LD 718 would open up the doors of the State House sausage factory. It would allow everyone to see everything, from when the pigs first walk in the door until the final law is left shrink-wrapped on the public’s doorstep.

The bill is not popular with many members of the legislature, however, because it will also expose the secret ingredient which goes into much of the legislation coming out of Augusta. That secret is that legislators don’t write much of the legislation they enact. Instead, it’s drafted by some special interest.

Not that special interests are a bad thing. The late Brooks Hamilton, who wrote Maine’s first Right-to-Know law, wasn’t a legislator. He was a newspaper man, and thus had a special interest in access to the workings of the government. I, too, am a special interest. I gained access to Rep. Brooks and requested he sponsor LD 718.

Access is what’s really at issue in the campaign reform debate, and it’s what fueled the support for Maine’s Clean Elections Law. Although LD 718 wouldn’t do anything to change the access a citizen or lobbyist had to a legislator, it would help the public see the access, so citizens could make up their own minds about the intention behind any pending legislation. LD 718 would accomplish this by making public the many legislative documents which are now hidden from public view — documents such as initial drafts of bills, often written on lobbyist stationary; letters from lobbyists to legislative committees; and other information Legislators are given to use as a basis for their votes, but which the public can’t see until long after the law has been passed.

Two years ago in the U.S. Congress there was raucous debate over the Republican majority’s Contract with America. But one section won almost unanimous bipartisan support — the provision that Congress should abide by the laws it imposes on the rest of us.

It’s time the Maine Legislature adopted the same policy. Passage of LD 718 would be a start. I urge citizens concerned about the workings of their state government to contact their legislators and see how they stand on LD 718.

I also hope members of the public — and the press — will ask legislators opposed to LD 718 if that opposition comes because those legislators have something to hide, or because they think their constituents are just too stupid to understand the real workings of the legislative process.

David Bright was a reporter and editor for the Bangor Daily News from 1970 to 1996. He now works for an international newspaper software company, with headquarters in Bedford, Mass.