For use Sunday, March 15, and thereafter

Crist’s counsel is an advocate for open government

Eds: This is one of six profiles about Florida open government advocates and two related stories moving in advance for Sunshine Sunday.

By JIM SAUNDERS
The Daytona Beach News-Journal

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — When Pat Gleason started working in the attorney general’s office in 1976, Florida government was going through a transformation.

Legislation, lawsuits and legal opinions were forcing open public meetings and records. And the attorney general’s office was a key player in the debates.

“We felt that we were doing very important work in the public interest,” said Gleason, who started in the office as an intern while attending law school at Florida State University. “It was extremely rewarding and exciting.”

Three decades later, Gleason had become a special counsel to Gov. Charlie Crist on open-government issues and was widely recognized as one of Florida’s top experts on public meetings and records.

But in 2007, she became disheartened that some attorneys wanted to expand the power of local government boards to hold closed-door meetings to discuss legal matters. She wrote an article for a Florida Bar publication criticizing the idea.

“Shouldn’t the people have a right to expect that closed meetings held to discuss how to spend their money are limited and restricted in scope?” she wrote.

For Gleason, the article reflected part of her basic view after more than 30 years of studying open-government issues, giving advice and mediating disputes: Government is more accountable and effective when it is open to citizens.

“The public should be welcome at the door because they make government do a better job,” Gleason said during a recent interview in her Capitol office.

Gleason, 57, has combined that passion with legal knowledge to play an important role during a period that has cemented Florida as a national leader on open-government issues.

Joe Adams, an editorial writer for The Florida Times-Union and author of “The Florida Public Records Handbook,” said he has gone to Gleason for years to talk about open-government issues. He called her an “incredibly great resource” for Florida.

“In a state that is known as the Sunshine State, she has been a leading light for a long time,” Adams said.

But Adams and Barbara Petersen, president of the Tallahassee-based First Amendment Foundation, said Gleason also is effective because she has an ability to listen to people and explain legal issues.

Petersen said that can be important in dealing with sometimes highly charged debates about government-in-the-sunshine issues.

“Pat is just such a steady, calming influence on a lot of people,” Petersen said.

Gleason worked for a succession of attorneys general before moving to the governor’s office after Crist was elected in 2006.

Her duties have varied over the years, and she now is Crist’s director of Cabinet affairs, along with serving as a special counsel on open-government issues.

But she is best known in Tallahassee and throughout the state as something of a guru on public records and meetings.

Under former Attorney General Bob Butterworth, for example, Gleason oversaw a program that mediated disputes between government agencies and the public about access to records and meetings.

The goal of the program was to try to resolve disputes without having to go through time-consuming and often costly lawsuits.

Gleason said the program showed that open-government issues are important to ordinary citizens, not just news organizations that sometimes launch highly publicized efforts to get access to records or meetings.

And in the end, Gleason said such access to meetings and records makes government officials more accountable “because they never know when someone wants to see what they have been up to.”

On the Net:

First Amendment Foundation: http://www.floridafaf.org/

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