Sunshine week shines light on public records laws, gov’t accountability

It’s National Sunshine Week, a time for Americans to celebrate America’s open records laws. The event is recognized by the American Society of News Editors, The National Freedom of Information Coalition (NFOIC) and even President Barack Obama.

In the wake of the Watergate scandal, the federal government and states created a network of laws which allowed citizens and news media to access government documents. Those documents can reveal hidden spending, wrongdoing by public officials, and malfeasance in any number of ways.

Charles Davis, executive director of NFOIC, says the laws get “an honorable, solid C” rating. He said that is because the laws have been “layered to death” by government bureaucracies.

“The problem is the spirit of openness runs into a phalanx of lawyers who look for the minimal disclosure instead of maximum disclosure,” Davis said. “What’s happened is that (the laws) have come to be interpreted ‘what is the least we have to do?’”

Chetly Zarko, who is the co-founder of the Michigan Transparency Project, says the laws are still a citizen’s “best tool to hold government accountable.”

“Transparency exposes the bad and more importantly deters it,” Zarko wrote in an e-mail to Michigan Messenger. “Of course, its not perfect and only as good as the effort citizens, traditional media, and new media put into it, but societies without political and governmental transparency are the ones history records as the most dangerous. Without open records and access laws we run the risk of takeover of our government and our lives by either side or extreme force”

Michigan Messenger has been involved in several high profile stories in which records requests played a pivotal role.

Among them were reports on a controversial sex sting operation conducted by Lansing Police. An investigation by Messenger uncovered documents which showed the sting operation was triggered by complaints from a sitting Police Board of Commissioners member. During the investigation, the city released a police report which released the identity and HIV-positive status of man arrested in the sting operation.

That release lead Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for governor, to ask Attorney General Mike Cox, who is seeking the Republican nomination for governor, to rule on whether the release of the information have broken any laws. The resulting ruling from the AG found no laws had been broken, but the situation led the Lansing City Council and Bernero administration to develop and adopt a new policy relating to private medical information and records requests.

One FOIA request by the Messenger’s Ed Brayton resulted in a federal lawsuit over the specifics of a secret trade deal hammered out by the Bush administration. The feds ultimately released the documents, which showed a secret trade deal that could undermine national security and public safety by putting dangerous Liquid Natural Gas terminals into foreign hands without any safeguards in place.

Unfortunately, as Charles Davis observed, some agencies are more reluctant than others to comply with the law and some FOIA requests end up being denied on frivolous grounds in order to keep vital information from the public.

On Tuesday, the Messenger reported about the Michigan Department of Community Health’s refusal to release documents related to H1N1 fundingand expenditures. The state claimed to release some documents would violate the state’s anti-terrorism laws. Messenger filed an appeal over the denial on Tuesday afternoon.

President Obama entered office promising a new era of transparency in government, and on his first day in office he signed an executive order declaring that all federal agencies “should adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure, in order to renew their commitment to the principles embodied in FOIA, and to usher in a new era of open Government. The presumption of disclosure should be applied to all decisions involving FOIA.”

Unfortunately, that promise remains mostly unfulfilled. The Associated Press released the results of a study on Tuesday that found that the use of exemptions to deny FOIA requests actually went up substantially during the first year of the Obama administration compared to the last couple years of the Bush administration.

In the same vein, an analysis by the Washington Post in January found more people sued the feds over open records requests in the first year of the Obama administration than the last two years of the Bush administration. That analysis found that more than 300 lawsuits had been filed.

Despite those problems, the FOIA laws remain a powerful tool, both for the traditional news media — as an editorial from the Kalamazoo Gazette pointed out Sunday — but for non-traditional media and citizens as well.

“It’s incredibly exciting,” Davis says of open records laws. “It levels the playing field between institutions and everybody else. (Citizens) can do the same work an investigative team does.”

From bloggers to freelancing reporters, he says, everyone can get a piece of the action as it relates to watching the government, and it is no longer just traditional media outlets that are putting that information out there.

“It’s a wonderful thing to watch,” Davis said.