It’s time for North Carolina legislators to get new computers. This time, instead of laptops, they might get tablets.
The lawmakers who will select the tablets haven’t decided yet whether to pick iPads, Galaxy Tabs, or Xooms, but whichever brand they settle on, tablet computers are supposed to save the state money and give the public better access to legislative documents and other materials.
Members of the General Assembly get new laptops approximately every four years. This year, the Joint Legislative Oversight Committee on Information Technology is considering the less-expensive option of tablets.
Ranging from $400 to $500, tablets cost significantly less than laptops. They also should save the state time and money in several other ways, says IT Committee co-chairman Sen. Andrew Brock, R-Davie.
Tablets are lighter in weight and have a longer battery life than laptops. Because of their portability, members would be required to carry them to all committee meetings and legislative sessions, allowing state government to go paperless.
Not only would going paperless reduce the cost of purchasing paper, it also would save money on printing contracts, copying costs, recycling pick up, and staff time putting bill books together and passing them out, Brock said.
A second benefit from moving to tablets: improved transparency.
Going paperless means agendas, presentations, bills, bill amendments, and all other legislative documents would be submitted electronically and available for lawmakers (and the rest of the world) to view on their tablets (or home computers) before legislative meetings even started.
As it stands, these documents are not available in their paper form until committee meetings begin, and they’re not online until a day or two later, if at all.
“When a document becomes legal for public view — which means as soon as it’s passed out to members of the General Assembly — instead of showing up physically to a meeting and waiting for a copy to be passed out by the sergeant at arms, anywhere in the world people can pull up the document online,” Brock said.
Brock says the committee is trying to push that deadline up, so the documents are legal for public view 24 hours before the meeting starts.
“When I was in the minority as a Republican, I didn’t like getting a document still hot from the printing press and voting on it before the paper cooled down,” Brock said. “There could be hundreds of pages to a bill.”
Additionally, any bill amendments legislators submitted would be available online in real time.
“If I submitted an amendment to a bill to the committee, it would be available to the public as soon as I hit send,” Brock said. “Now I would have to walk the amendment up to the clerk, and then copies would be passed out to members. Any extra copies would be passed out to the press and then to the public at the meeting place. The rest of the world would have to wait until well after the meeting was over for it to be posted online, if it were posted at all.”
Kory Swanson, executive vice president of the John Locke Foundation and manager of NCTransparency.com, JLF’s government transparency website, said giving more information to the public in real time should improve oversight of the General Assembly’s activities.
“I think having the information available for public perusal is a big deal if it makes the legislator more accountable,” Swanson said.
Brock said the committee also is working on developing Apple and Android applications, so the NCGA webpage can be more easily viewed on smart phones and tablets.
“The public will have full access to the information we have,” he said. “The governor campaigned on having an open book. Well, the legislature is keeping the governor’s campaign promise. We’re opening the whole thing up for people to see.”
Brock said several lawmakers already have purchased tablets with their own money. In addition to being easier to carry from meeting to meeting, he says they’re easier to read, allowing users to scroll through long documents and zoom in and out with their fingertips.
He also noted that legislators currently can’t access social networking sites from their state-issued laptops. “We can’t update a Facebook status, if we’re working on or voting on a bill that we want our constituents’ feedback on.”
“I have a lot of people send messages to my Facebook account,” he said. “It’s a modern form of communication like email, faxes, and telephones were at one time. As times change forms of communication change, and we, as legislators, need to make changes as well so we can keep up with our constituents.”
Brock said the IT Committee will be conducting a pilot program issuing several legislators various brands of tablets, to see which are the most user friendly and cost effective.
Sara Burrows is an associate editor of Carolina Journal.