Highlands Today

We Must Demand Open Access To Our Government

It’s strange that the American people hold dear transparency in government, but allow officials to continually keep vital information from us. Government officials – especially at the federal level – are going to extremes to keep information confidential, not allowing the people an opportunity to know what’s going on. That’s not only troubling, it’s downright un-American.

Two national polls conducted last week, on the eve of this week’s second national Sunshine Week, show that the public equates open government with effective democracy. And they are concerned about official secrecy at all levels.

Sixty-two percent of all Americans say that “public access to government records is critical to the functioning of good government,” according to a poll by the American Society of Newspaper Editors. A second survey conducted at Ohio University states that 81 percent of the people said that democracy depends on open government.

For too long, we’ve allowed our lawmakers at all levels to rollback openness of public records. They use words like “national security” or “private information” as ways to keep us from seeing documents that in no way threaten our security.

The public must have open access to how our government operates. We cannot tolerate secret meetings of city councils, state legislatures or Congress. And we must not allow our presidential administration to use executive privilege to develop policy by allowing lobbyists and other special interest groups to have undue influence without the public knowing exactly who was part of it. This happened when Vice President Dick Cheney invited his coal and oil buddies in to write our nation’s energy policy. He still won’t reveal who was at the meeting.

On the local level, that means our law enforcement, health department, county commission and any other governmental body to quit limiting people’s access to full disclosure of what they are doing. They are, after all, doing the public’s business. We have every right to have access to this information. The good news is that in most cases, our local officials understand Florida’s strong laws on open meetings and access to documents.

Floridians should appreciate this important right and exercise it freely.

All of us must pressure our government at every level to quit hiding information from the public and be open and forthright about how our government operates.

This is vital information for a healthy democracy and it’s time to push back the attempts made in recent years of spoon feeding information to the public and to start providing full access. We can make intelligent decisions with the right information. Without it, we are in the dark with no idea where we are at or where we are going.

Reproduced courtesy of Highlands Today.
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