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Sunshine a bulwark of good government By State Reps. Dan Gelber and Jack Seiler The Sunshine Law is a strange being. It was created to open government for citizens to see and hear what goes on inside and has become a battleground every legislative session as we consider the newest batch of exceptions. The media and citizens fight for the public's right to know. Office holders or special interests who find the Sunshine Law too constraining are on the other side. Hundreds of bills have been introduced to create exemptions to Florida's laws requiring open records and open meetings. Many exceptions addressed small, discreet areas but some would have made large gaping holes in the law. A dozen or so have passed recently, and it is likely the onslaught of proposals will continue. The easy availability of legislative exceptions in the past has made the practice dangerous. Currently, there are more than 1,000 exceptions to the public records laws. At the current pace, Florida's grand tradition of government in the sunshine will suffer death by a thousand paper cuts. Gutting this law would be a serious loss. It is impossible to inventory all the great misdeeds, abuses and overreaching that were uncovered or prevented by Florida's public records laws over the past thirty-seven years. Misconduct by public officials, contract fraud, election misconduct, health care mistakes, and civil rights violations, are among the many. Our State's Sunshine Law is one of the strong laws that protect ordinary citizens from abuses by their government. It is a bedrock principle that empowers people to understand their government and hold it accountable. Even with the best of intentions, a bureaucracy can easily run roughshod over the rights of ordinary citizens. With bad intentions, government can do much worse. Shining the light on government actions can only improve government responsiveness. By requiring government to be equally open to everyone -- whether they are a powerful news network or an ordinary citizen who thinks he has been wronged -- everybody is vested with equal power. The principle of making government totally accessible is the one sure way to achieve honest government. What better example than what happened a few months ago: the State's Division of Elections tried to avoid producing the list of felons it chose to purge from local voting rolls. Certainly, it would have been easier and clearly less embarrassing if Governor Jeb Bush and Secretary Glenda Hood had kept their felon list secret. After all, it's easier to govern when people are not looking over your shoulder. But in Florida, because our constitutional sunshine provisions prevailed, we learned of mistakes being made in preparation for the upcoming national election. Unquestionably, the discomfort that followed was a better alternative than allowing our fellow citizens to be disenfranchised and our democratic process tainted. Another important value of these laws is the balance they provide where one political party commands total power, as in Florida, and the branches of government tend to lose their ability to check and balance one another. The Sunshine Law and the transparency it provides literally force accountability that is otherwise diminished or lost. No matter which political party is on top, absolute power becomes a danger to the democratic process unless it too must answer to an informed citizenry. The Sunshine Law, with all the inconveniences it causes, is an absolute bulwark of our system. Our hope for this legislative session and those that follow is that we, on both sides of the aisle, will do more than merely reject those "exceptions" deemed unnecessary. Rather than merely playing defense year after year to try to stop bad ideas that diminish its letter and spirit, we should examine ways to strengthen Florida's Sunshine Law. For example, we should consider rescinding unwise exemptions to the law that the legislature passed in prior years. We should also give the public records laws more teeth, by demanding more timely responses by government to requests for public records. Unquestionably, government could run smoother if citizens and the press did not have a right to access information as guaranteed by the Sunshine Law, but it would not run better. Openness makes for clarity and fairness. A participatory democracy can only truly invest power in its citizens if it gives them those tools that truly empower. No tool is more powerful than knowledge.
State Rep. Dan Gelber is a Democrat from Miami Beach. |
