For use Sunday, March 15, and thereafter.

Nothing’s secret about open government advocate

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

By JESSICA GRESKO
Associated Press Writer

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — There’s a file in Barbara Petersen’s office labeled “Death Threat” in red pen. The office has only saved one on an answering machine cassette tape but there was a time in 2001 after the death of NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt when threats coming in by e-mail and phone were not uncommon.

As the president of the First Amendment Foundation, which advocates for citizens’ access to government meetings and records, Petersen found herself defending the public’s right to access autopsy photos, including those of Earnhardt, who died in a crash at the Daytona 500.

NASCAR fans didn’t like it. Callers and e-mailers threatened to put her dead sister’s autopsy photos online even though no autopsy had been done when her sister died of breast cancer.

Petersen said the venom shocked her, but it didn’t change what she was doing.

“It didn’t make me question the rightness of my position,” she said.

As the head of the nonprofit foundation for more than a decade, Petersen has gotten used to taking sometimes unpopular positions. And she’s become not just well-known to Florida politicians, who have come to rely on her opinion, but also nationally.

“If a government agency came to me and said, Barbara Petersen thinks it’s a bad idea’ then I’d say, Well, then it’s a bad idea isn’t it?’” said Pat Gleason, the top lawyer for Florida Gov. Charlie Crist on open government.

And with all her talk of openness and transparency, there’s no exemption to what Petersen, 56, will disclose about herself. She grew up in Virginia with two sisters. She confronted rulemakers early, once participating in a sit-in at her principal’s office to demand girls be allowed to wear pants instead of required skirts.

After high school she wanted to study art, but her father disapproved, and she left school. She’s lived in Brussels, the Caribbean and six other states, including Missouri where she moved with her husband National Book Award-winning writer Bob Shacochis and where she finished school at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

Along the way she has had jobs as a travel agent, managing a marina where she weighed fish and pumped fuel and as a waitress at a crepe chain where she had to wear a traditional peasant dress, a dirndl. Friends nicknamed her “catfish” after a poem by Richard Brautigan.

At 34, however, Petersen decided she wanted to be a lawyer and she and Shacochis moved to Florida, where she attended Florida State University in Tallahassee and later joined the Legislature as a staff attorney.

There she helped research and write a law that ensured access to electronic records and became interested in the laws around records. In 1995 she left to become the first and only employee of the First Amendment Foundation, started by media groups statewide with the mission of protecting access to government records.

Today, the Tallahassee office has one other attorney and three interns who staff a hot line where citizens can call to get help. During the legislative session they check on open government bills twice daily, and all the other bills get a daily once-over to ensure they haven’t been changed to affect public records. They’ve also become known for their weekly legislative report that has smiley faces next to good bills and frowns next to ones Petersen deems “stinky.”

Politicians pay attention.

“Simply her saying This is a bad idea’ is almost enough to give (a bill) a really hard road to passage,” said Sen. Dan Gelber, D-Miami Beach, the former House Minority Leader.

Journalists rely on Petersen, too.

“I call her particularly if I have a question about my legal right to something,” said St. Petersburg Times reporter Lucy Morgan, a longtime Tallahassee reporter who won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting.

Before Petersen, Morgan said, reporters didn’t have an outside expert they could turn to with questions. Now, Petersen gets those questions, and in the past year she’s also trained 1,200 state agency employees on responding to open government requests.

Not everyone has been such a fan of Petersen’s work, however. In 2001 after Earnhardt’s death, the Legislature wanted to make it more difficult to get access to autopsy photos and video records.

Petersen took the position along with newspapers like the Orlando Sentinel that the pictures should be public record. The photographs and video are the only objective evidence of what happened while an autopsy report is subjective, she said. It wasn’t a popular stance.

Former Orlando Sentinel editor Tim Franklin said he talked with Petersen daily during that time.

“Barbara and I both still have the tread marks from that on our back, I think,” said Franklin, who helped start Sunshine Sunday in Florida, along with Petersen, and now co-chairs the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ Freedom of Information Committee. Florida’s Sunshine Sunday led to a national Sunshine Week led by ASNE.

Ultimately, the autopsy bill passed, but that didn’t dissuade Petersen. Later, after 9/11, lawmakers filed a record number of bills to close access to records. Petersen challenged many of them, even though one lobbyist called her up to scream that she was personally going to be responsible for the next terrorist attack.

“Everyone was reacting out of fear,” Petersen said, but “nothing horrible passed.”

Her advocacy didn’t make her popular with people like Gov. Jeb Bush, but Bush’s successor, Gov. Charlie Crist, has been different. One of his first acts in January 2007 was to create an Office of Open Government. He also appointed a special commission on improving Florida’s open government laws, naming Petersen the committee’s chair.

The commission’s nearly 200-page report, which Petersen wrote, was approved in January and delivered to Crist. She hopes that next year some of the commission’s work will result in legislation.

For now, with the Legislature’s 60-day session started March 2, Petersen says the First Amendment Foundation is tracking more bills than it has in some time. There are a few she likes: one that ensures access to the investigative records of the Department of Children and Families and lets foster children access their records. Another bill creates a Web site where citizens could easily track government spending.

Many others, she says, are particularly “stinky.” There’s a bill that would ban the public from accessing crime scene photos that show any part of a body and another that would close access to the names and information of teachers, school administrators and elected school board members. Others bills would close access to the cell phone number and records of active and former law enforcement personnel and others and the identity of owners of vacant or abandoned property and property in foreclosure.

Petersen says just thinking about the bills can make her tired.

“I don’t know any organization or any public interest group or any lobbyist that has this level of an assault on its issues every year,” she said. “It’s just stunning.”

On the Net:

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

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