For use Sunday, March 15, and thereafter

Ex-Herald editor: Government in Sunshine took time

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

By EVAN S. BENN
The Miami Herald

MIAMI (AP) — When Pete Weitzel began reporting in Miami in 1959, he covered city councils that made decisions behind closed doors and a state Legislature that conducted most of its business in private.

Fifty years later, the Sunshine State is home to some of the strongest open-government laws in the nation, and Weitzel has led the fight to make it that way.

Weitzel, 72, who retired as managing editor of The Miami Herald in 1995, helped launch Florida’s First Amendment Foundation and the National Freedom of Information Coalition. He has also served as information coordinator for the Coalition of Journalists for Open Government and as executive director of the North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence.

Q: What have been some of Florida’s greatest successes in the realm of open government?

A: After the U.S. Supreme Court ordered legislative reapportionment, an urban-controlled, reform-minded Legislature convened in Tallahassee in the spring of 1967. It began a major restructuring of Florida’s governance, including passage of the Government in the Sunshine Law, which mandated open local government meetings, and a massive rewrite of the Public Records Law, broadening it to cover every state and local governmental agency and all of their records.

One other success, or really a series of successes, should be noted: a trio of attorneys general who believed in transparency and dedicated their offices to vigorous implementation of the open-government laws. Bob Shevin, who had been a member of the 1967 Legislature, established a strong open-government unit in the AG’s office in the early 1970s, writing tough opinions and bringing some landmark public records lawsuits. Bob Butterworth established an open-government mediation unit in the AG’s office.

Charlie Crist continued that open-government advocate tradition when he became attorney general in 2002 and carried it with him when he moved to the governor’s office, establishing an Open Government Office there in 2007 and setting up a Commission on Open Government, which recently reported a series of recommendations for further improvements. The important test will be whether the current Legislature enacts those recommendations.

Q: What have been some pitfalls?

A: Special interests, the culture of government and technology.

There will always be those who believe it in their best interest to keep information from the public.

The culture of government is another continuing challenge. Despite the Constitution, despite superb open-government laws, despite decades of attorney general opinions and Supreme Court decisions, there are still public officials who do not enthusiastically practice what the laws proscribe, who obstruct rather than facilitate transparency.

The third problem area is technology. The Internet affords vast and unique opportunities to make available the information of and about government and in doing so create a new civic involvement. But it also can be a vehicle for privacy abuses.

Q: As news organizations continue to deal with economic cutbacks, there are fewer reporters left to keep tabs on elected officials and government agencies. What should media outlets do to continue to be effective watchdogs?

A: Make technology your tool, not your adversary. CraigsList may be eating into classified advertising, but government information posted online can save lots of time, mileage and legwork. Catalog what’s available online, and press the governments you deal with to post in a timely fashion more reports and records that you and the public need to stay abreast of what’s happening. This will let reporters use their time more effectively and it will better inform the public.

Recruit citizen sources individual and organizational. Identify the important local bloggers, especially if they do any actual reporting or are plugged in to newsmakers, and monitor what they are discovering and saying.

Make open government a continuing issue. It may not be possible to maintain the same level of investigative reporting, but reporters can increase the attention given on government transparency as part of their regular reporting. Tell readers any time information is withheld, and why. Let them know, too, when information you are presenting came from public records so they begin to appreciate the importance of records access, so they can see the issue of open government in an everyday context.

Q: Early in his new administration, President Obama has promised more transparency in government. What kind of changes have you seen in terms of federal public records availability, and what do you hope to see over the next four years?

A: President Obama’s first-day directives on openness were encouraging, actually quite refreshing after eight years of the greatest peacetime secrecy in our nation’s history. But there has been no visible follow through yet. And there have been a few missteps. Most worrisome, the Justice Department is still holding to the overreaching “state secrets” positions of the Bush administration.

It will not be easy to overcome the institutional culture of the federal government, which has successfully resisted effective implementation of its Freedom of Information Act for more than 40 years and has not fully implemented the electronic-FOIA update of 1996. But now there is at least some reason to hope.

Back to top | Return to Sunshine Sunday 2009