North Carolina's lawmakers take information out of the public's hands one of three ways. Often it's on purpose, such as when legislators gave public hospitals the right last year to keep most employees' pay confidential. The state doesn't typically do that for public employees, but the rationale was to put competing public and private hospitals under the same rules.

Sometimes it happens when vague or confusing legal language gets misinterpreted, which occurred recently in a dispute over whether state pension records were public information.

It took Attorney General Roy Cooper's overriding his staff's legal interpretation to restore the openness that lawmakers said they had intended.

And sometimes lawmakers mean to exempt one kind of information from public disclosure, but changing the law unintentionally conceals other kinds from the public.

That's why, during the worst drought in North Carolina's recorded history, you're not entitled to know who's conserving water and who's not.

The avowedly accidental secrecy of water records in hundreds of towns across the state is a prime example of how the law of unintended consequences sometimes ensnares the public's right to know what the government is up to -- and how hard secrecy is to roll back.

A 2001 change in state law was meant to allow public electric co-operatives to keep their billing accounts private, just like those of competing electric companies.

But the language in the exemption was so broad that it applies to every kind of public utility billing -- including what cities charge businesses and homeowners for water, and how much their customers use of the scarce, essential public resource.

That was a goof, several lawmakers and lobbyists involved in the law's passage say.

"I can absolutely assure you that that was not the intent," said Alice Garland, a state lottery executive who pushed the bill as the electric co-ops' lobbyist then. "Folks weren't thinking about water systems. Water conservation wasn't an issue at the time. Nobody was forward-thinking enough to anticipate that."

Senate Majority Leader Tony Rand, a Fayetteville Democrat who filed the utilities bill, says he wasn't trying to shield water bills.

"That was for ElectriCities only," Rand said last week. "Water was never part of it. Water billing isn't a competitive issue. It should be public, it seems to me."

But now, because of the utility billing law, it's not.

Mayor: Sunshine, please

In drought-ravaged Raleigh, for example, city officials have cited the utility law in refusing to release the water records of its biggest customers -- including Pepsi, which bottles treated city water as Aquafina.

And Raleigh Mayor Charles Meeker says it's hard to debate publicly the city's regulations for carwashes, landscapers and other customers as long their records are confidential.

"The more transparency there is, the better off the public will be, knowing that everybody is trying to conserve," he said.

Raleigh resident Joe Kertis opposes the water secrecy.

"That bothers the heck out of me," said Kertis, 79, a retired Rockwell International manager. "You're supposed to be able to tell what the government's doing. We all need water. I'd like to know who's using it, and what they're paying for it."

Kertis is far from alone.

"I get tons of calls about this," said Raleigh lawyer Amanda Martin, general counsel to the N.C. Press Association. "People are interested in who's using all the water, particularly large companies that are big water users. The water you use is water I can't use."

Next page >