Eliminate government secrecy
There are no comments for this page [ Add Comment ]Thursday, March 15, 2007
Although we sometimes like to believe it's true, Utah's politicians and government bureaucrats aren't really much different than their counterparts in other states. They don't appreciate being second-guessed, they'd just as soon do their business in private and they frequently try to pass laws to make public oversight more difficult. As we said in this space on Sunday, this is Sunshine Week -- seven days during which the nation's media place an extra emphasis on open government.
Government officials, when they're backing laws restricting your right to know, like to use the media to make their straw man arguments: "Why should we make it easier for them to sell newspapers?" is their most common rhetorical, sneering question. Or, they'll claim that identity thieves are trying to steal information for nefarious purposes. We've heard both those arguments at the Legislature, time and time again.
But those are false arguments. Are newspapers private businesses? Yes, but we conduct our newsgathering in pursuit of the public good. Consider this: If newspapers weren't out there gathering the news, there wouldn't be much news on television, radio or the Internet -- all of which depend on newspaper coverage to get them started in the morning.
But more importantly, open-records searches are used far more often by non-media-employed Americans. As Christine Tatum, national president of the Society of Professional Journalists, wrote in this newspaper only yesterday, "The Coalition of Journalists for Open Government analyzed 6,439 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to 11 Cabinet-level departments and six large agencies in September 2005. The review found that more than 60 percent of the requests came from commercial interests ... . The second largest group of requesters -- categorized as 'other' and composed mostly of private citizens -- comprised a third of the total number of requests. ... (And) 'media' requests accounted for only 6 percent of the total."
We live in the post-Sept. 11 era, and governments at all levels have done an effective job of convincing Americans that records should be kept private. In Utah, 2006 marked the peak of the more-government-secrecy effort. A task force made up exclusively of legislators recommended shutting off all sorts of public records that had been explicitly made available in 1991 with the passage of the Government Records Access Management Act. Among other things, they attempted to make private the e-mails between lawmakers and constituents, and were successful in removing access to e-mails between legislators and their staff members; now the public may not be able to discern the motivations behind legislative decisions. They also removed access to the cell-phone numbers of lawmakers, even though taxpayers are funding those phones. They were unsuccessful, for the most part, in trying to remove access to public-inspection records and other information sources that have long been public records.
Although open-government advocates beat back most of the proposed restrictions, it was still a net loss for public access. Interestingly, the principal author of GRAMA, former House Speaker Marty Stephens, of Farr West, wrote an impassioned plea during the 2006 session for these very pages urging lawmakers to make government more open, not less: "The basic premise of the legislation is that there should be a presumption of openness in the records held by government. ... In this electronic age, I believe most of these bills are headed in exactly the wrong direction. ... We should be finding ways to make access to records easier, not enacting further hurdles for those wanting to know what our government is doing and why."
Such legislative scorn for public access is not confined to the Legislature. The Top of Utah was reminded of that last fall. The Ogden City Council refused to release information about applicants for a vacant City Council seat -- in violation of its own policies regarding the release of such information. Its response was not to provide the information when it realized its error; instead, it voted to change the policy to OK withholding the information. As we noted at the time, it was naked, hypocritical abuse of power by people who had, ironically, campaigned for election on platforms of open government and had been critical of incumbents who they said conducted business outside the public's view.
The battle against government doing its business in the shadows is relentless and never-ending. We will continue to fight for your right to know, but we need your help to win. Make sure you let candidates for office know that open government is high on your list of priorities.
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