WHAT DIFFERENCE WOULD it make if Californians had a constitutional right of access to meetings of state and local officials and to the information they control? That's what people ask increasingly as they learn about SCA 7, a bill introduced Jan. 10 by state senate president pro tem John Burton (D-San Francisco).

SCA 7 would place a state constitutional amendment on the November ballot. The bill would have to pass both the senate and the assembly by a two-thirds majority. Once on the ballot, the amendment would need only a simple majority of voter approval.

The sponsors, the California First Amendment Coalition and the California Newspaper Publishers Association, say that the need for a constitutional basis for sunshine in government has been accelerating over the past decade or so, compounded by the following developments:

• Court decisions have expanded exemptions from disclosure. A recent case extended "law enforcement" confidentiality even to basic information about traffic stops. Another decision held that the law-enforcement exemption never wanes, even if no harm would result from disclosing the information. Virtually any business channeled by a government agency through its lawyers, including information from and/or about a contracting party, is now free from exposure.

• On the open-meeting side, courts have concluded that local councils and boards can use closed sessions to set performance goals for their chief executives. Local councils and boards can also use the Ralph M. Brown Act's rules authorizing closed sessions to discuss property negotiations so sweepingly that they successfully resisted a recent legislative effort to narrow the rules to information not known to the other bargaining party.

• In connection with the Insurance Department controversy that led to the resignation of Commissioner Charles Quackenbush, a state senator's efforts over months to obtain Insurance Department records under the California Public Records Act led to nothing but stonewalling. As a result, a joint legislative staff task force concluded that the act had been "interpreted, reinterpreted and fiddled with to the point that it has become of little appreciable value to the public."

• Recent governors, irrespective of party, have vetoed reform legislation. Former governor Pete Wilson and incumbent Gray Davis vetoed a series of three attempts to improve public access to records held in electronic form. Davis finally signed a fourth try. Davis also vetoed two successive efforts to allow the attorney general to review, with nonbinding effect, public agencies' denials of access to records.

SCA 7 would, in effect, allow court challenges at two levels. Statutes could be challenged on their face for protecting some interest not falling within a handful of broad categories given approval for confidential treatment. The second new check on overexpansive secrecy would be at the administrative level. Governmental bodies would have to justify closed sessions and exemptions from disclosure of public records (other than those grounded in personal privacy) not only by an applicable statute but also by a detailed explanation of the harm that would result from public access. The bill would require access restrictions to be narrowly tailored in terms of breadth and duration.