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Northwest Florida Daily News Sunshine Sunday Editorial Just as darkness creeps over places that once were warmed by sunshine, secrecy tends to return to corners of government that once were illuminated by open-meetings and open-records laws. Government prefers to operate behind locked doors and shuttered windows. Public vigilance is required to keep these doors and windows open, the deliberations and decisions of government bodies accessible to all. Thus, the 13-year tug of war over Florida’s Sunshine Amendment. In 1992, voters amended the Florida Constitution to declare all government meetings and records open to the public unless specifically closed by the Legislature. Since then, the Legislature has regularly considered exemptions — hundreds of them — to open-meetings and public-records laws. The intent is to nudge the door shut, inch by inch. This year is no different. Bills on the table for the current legislative session would conceal the home addresses of certain government workers, hide the reports of court monitors, and exempt from the public record “any personal or private record” produced by a law enforcement officer regarding an investigation of complaints against that officer. At least two proposals deal with fallout from mistakes. One bill would allow the non-judicial arrest records of people mistakenly arrested by law enforcement agencies to be expunged. Another measure is aimed at squelching the public’s right of access to “adverse medical incident” reports. “ Lawmakers keep chipping away at Sunshine laws,” noted Terry Eberle, president of the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. But concern about dwindling sunshine should not be limited to journalists. Everyone has a stake in open government because everyone is affected by the actions of government. Whether the topic is taxation or regulation, public safety or national defense, citizens should know what their public officials are up to. James Madison, primary author of the Bill of Rights, observed that “the right of freely examining public characters and measures has ever been justly deemed the only effectual guardian of every other right.” In other words, open government is a cornerstone of democracy. When government conducts its business in shadow, refusing to let public officials and records be “freely examined,” uncertainty grows. Citizens cannot properly evaluate the conduct of their leaders. Mistrust grows, too. Citizens wonder what their leaders are trying to hide. And it is citizens, after all, with the most urgent need to know. As Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1787: “In free Governments the rulers are the servants, and the people their superiors & sovereigns.” Don’t you want to know what the servants are doing? Lawmakers meeting in Tallahassee ought to honor the spirit of Florida’s open-government revolution by rejecting all attempts to move public information out of the sunshine.
Reproduced courtesy
of Northwest Florida Daily News. |
