Reprint courtesy of the Houston Chronicle

Transparency in government should be an inviolable marker of the people’s right to know.

It’s an old story: Elected officials take office and quickly forget that they are servants of the people, not mini-potentates. Likewise, bureaucrats running state agencies learn to ignore the fact that those agencies exist to do the people’s business. The people, those pesky citizens who pay their salaries, deserve to know how they’re doing.

How...