For use Sunday, March 15

Clouds on the horizon for Florida’s Sunshine Law

By Bill Cotterell
Florida Capital Bureau Political Editor

Legislators call them shell bills, blank slates to be filled in later in the legislative session.

But the First Amendment Foundation calls them “silent stinkers” -- phantom pieces of legislation that can spring, full-grown, into Florida lawbooks with unpredictable impact. And there are more of them this year than ever before.

“An organization with a tracking system can constantly monitor any changes in these bills but, for the average citizen, it’s virtually impossible to know what’s going on,” said Barbara Petersen, president of the FAF. “Going just by the sheer number of bills filed, I’m a little concerned this year.”

As Florida observes Sunshine Sunday, with government and media celebrating the state’s historic full disclosure, advocates of public records and open meetings are seeing clouds on the horizon. There are bills, for instance, to exempt from public-records laws some personnel information about teachers, cell phone numbers and other previously open data.

And Petersen, an attorney who has worked legislative committees for years on public-access issues, said there are 14 shell bills that simply state the Legislature’s intention to do something with laws relating to open government. There are another 80 in the Senate, plus two constitutional amendments, which don’t even say what they will deal with.

It could be literally anything, Petersen said. And although they have free access to legislative records and meetings during the 60-day session, which ends on May Day, citizens have no way of knowing -- until someone offers an amendment fleshing out the bills -- what department, activity or tax might be affected by each bill.

“You can use those shell bills for a lot of things,” said Sen. Durell Peaden, R-Crestview, who chairs a Senate budget panel on health and human services. “We’re not going to do a lot of reorganization, unless you can show monetary benefits. Ours are just for budgetary changes, what we have to have in conforming bills.”

Complying with federal stimulus funding regulations or changing statutes to delete programs due to state spending regulations are the stated intent of the shell bills. Each Senate budget chairman drew 10 except for criminal-justice budget chief Victor Crist, R-Temple Terrace, who set aside 20 blank bills.

Aside from the generic, details-to-come bills, Petersen said First Amendment advocates are worried about seven other bills writing exemptions into laws that provide public access to information about public officials or events. One, she said, would make people go to court to see crime-scene photos, another would exempt home addresses of state business-regulation officials, another would withhold cell phone numbers from public records and another would black out identifying information about school teachers.

“I know what they’re trying to do, to protect people’s privacy, but they’re going too far,” said Petersen. “A lot of bills, I don’t think they understand their full effect.”

But Sen. Mike Fasano, R-New Port Richey, said he filed the school teacher bill at the request of school employees who felt harassed by one man who demanded to know home addresses, home phone numbers, names of spouses and children and details of what insurance plans the teachers belonged to -- which is all in personnel files. He said his intention was not to stop parents from contacting their children’s teachers, on the job.

“I had one teacher, a single mother, who was actually petrified about someone wanting personal information about her,” said Fasano. “Every classroom has a phone and the teacher has an e-mail address at the school, and if they want to they can give out their home phone numbers and personal e-mail. But nobody has to have access to their health and benefits coverage, information on what kind of coverage their spouse and dependents may have.”

Florida Press Association lobbyist Curt Kiser, a former Dunedin state legislator who has worked on public-access issues for decades, said the state is in fairly good shape overall. The governor’s special commission on open government recently made its recommendations for updating laws for the computer-access age, and the Legislature is working on some budget-transparancy plans that will let citizens browse through public spending records online in great detail.

“I still think we have one of the better statutes and some of the better compliance numbers in the state of Florida, but we still have a ways to go,” said Kiser. “There are still a lot of people who don’t understand the benefit of public records until they have to find one.”

Petersen said legislators need to understand that a strong presumption of openness exists in Florida and that the Constitution enshrines the public’s right to know.

“Every time they create an exemption, they’re creating an exception to the Constitution,” said Petersen.

Reproduced courtesy of The Tallahassee Democrat
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