Our Tom is no techie
If information is power, Attorney General Tom Reilly has done precious little to empower me -- or you.
Websites are for better and worse -- and mainly better -- the information portal of choice these days. Go to the Massachusetts Secretary of State's website and in minutes you can get a wealth of information on lobbyists -- who works for whom and what they are paid. On the same site you can check out business incorporations -- or incorporate your business online. The Office of Campaign and Political Finance has a detailed, searchable database on political contributions and how the money is spent. The Treasurer's Office makes searching for abandoned property a snap. Even the Legislature, for heaven's sake, posts proposed legislation online.
It's a different story at the website overseen by Reilly -- the man who would be governor.
Consider the nonprofit sector, a vast and critical area regulated by the attorney general. To access the mountain of reports filed annually by the state's hospitals, HMOs, and universities you do what I did yesterday. You take the Green Line to Government Center and walk to the handsomely renovated Saltonstall Building. Take the escalator to the second floor, check in with the security desk, pass through the metal detectors and take the elevator to the 11th floor. There in a foyer you find two computer terminals and two dog-eared three-ring binders with more than 1,100 pages of charities. The instructions: ``If the computer is not logged in, log-in information appears on the sticky note on the computer monitor." The password on the sticky note, by the way, is ``Public1."
In the year 2006 in a state that considers itself a technology leader this is beyond a bad joke. Transparency is not an option but a requirement today, and in 7 1/2 years in office Reilly has not found a way to move the basic financial reports of our important brand-name institutions -- to say nothing of the thousands of no-name charities -- from an archaic internal computer system to the Web where anyone can access them any time.
The attorney general's explanation: We're working on it. ``We have come a long way and the office is ready to take some important next steps," a spokesman says. In other words, good luck Martha Coakley, the state's next A G.
It gets worse. Consumer protection is among Reilly's basic responsibilities, but you can't file a consumer complaint online with his office. You can with the Better Business Bureau and California's attorney general, to name just two. If you want to check out which car dealers or home improvement companies have the most consumer complaints, you can do that with Reilly's office. But you'll have to come in or call the hotline. You can't do it online.
Says Edgar Dworsky, a longtime consumer advocate and a former assistant attorney general: ``The website is plain vanilla. It is not state of the art. It provides a consumer information and how to make a complaint the old-fashioned way -- by mail."
Reilly's most ambitious online initiative was abandoned after two years of work and huge spending. The idea, developed after the near collapse of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care (Reilly's signature moment), was to produce an interactive website that would allow people to answer specific health care concerns. Reilly's office says the Massachusetts HealthBenchmarks project was a collaboration that included the Cellucci administration, the University of Massachusetts and the Office of Health and Human Services and failed largely because of budgetary issues. But Reilly's fingerprints were all over this bomb.
Reilly has taken heat over what he did -- and did not do -- on the Big Dig. The story of the attorney general's website is important, too, for what it says about the blocking and tackling that goes on there every day, and Reilly's ability to steward change. Or not.
Steve Bailey is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at bailey@globe.com or at 617-929-2902. 
