Governor Chet Culver announced on Tuesday that he will reduce Iowa’s general budget by $40 million during the current budget year (which runs through June 2009) and will ask the state legislature to retract an appropriation of $37 million to replace the Wallace Building, which houses many state offices.

The Des Moines Register reported that the $40 million in cuts will come from “freezing most hiring, halting out-of-state travel, reducing purchases and making cuts to the state’s public universities.”

Culver asked state departments last month to recommend cuts to help trim the current fiscal year’s budget. His request was that each agency try to cut roughly 3 percent from its operating budget.

After reviewing those recommendations, Culver decided how to reduce spending by $40 million, which represents about two-thirds of one percent of the current-year $6.1 billion budget.

The Des Moines Register has requested documents showing which spending cuts were recommended by state agencies, but

The governor’s attorney, Jim Larew, said in a letter to The Des Moines Register that the documents are privileged communications between the governor and officers of the executive department. He acknowledged that there is no statute or case law in Iowa that supports that position, but he said such a privilege exists in some states. […]

Several taxpayer and open-record advocacy groups have argued that the information is a public record and should be made available to citizens.

I see no reason to consider recommendations on spending cuts privileged information. Citizens have an interest in learning which proposed spending cuts Culver approved and which he discarded. More spending cuts may be needed in the next few months, and those recommendations would indicate where the ax is likely to fall if necessary.

This information should be a matter of public record.

Iowa was one of 38 states to get an “F” on its open records law, according to this front-page article in Thursday’s Des Moines Register.

“The question posed was: Do states have a good apparatus built to … make it easier to further a complaint short of litigating?” said Charles Davis, executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. The group helped sponsor the study, which was conducted by the Better Government Association last year.

Sponsors of the study stressed the research attempted to measure how easy it was for citizens to obtain access to records, not the strength of state open records laws themselves.

There are a lot of interesting details in the article, so if freedom of information is a big issue for you, click the link.

The Register’s editorial board writes a lot about open-records law, and I give them credit for that. Unfortunately, under Gannett’s ownership, the Register hasn’t devoted nearly enough resources to solid investigative reporting.

I wish the editors were assigning more reporters to dig into the information that’s already publicly available.