Leesburg Daily Commercial

For nearly a century, Florida has led the way in open government, enshrining before most other states laws that guaranteed access to government documents and public meetings. But in recent years, Florida has led the way in another, far less prideworthy category.

According to an informal count of information available from the Florida First Amendment Foundation, Florida lawmakers have since 2002 created or re-enacted a whopping 71 bills in some way restricting access to public information. That makes the Sunshine State one of just two in the nation, according to the Associated Press, to have passed 51 or more such laws since 2001. (The Foundation’s records from 2001 weren’t clear enough to allow a tally.)

California is the other to have passed at least 51 restrictions, though it also leads the nation in loosening access, having passed at least 51 such laws.

Florida, by contrast, has passed ... five.

71-5. If it were a football game, the second string would have entered before halftime.

It’s not as though Florida is unique in that regard. Thirty-three states have managed to pass five or fewer laws in the past five years to loosen access to information.

But in a state that bills itself as the pioneer of open-access laws, 71-5 is an embarrassing, frightening figure.

Some of the restrictions that have been added have been legitimate, aimed at protecting citizens from what used to be unimaginable horrors or from having their banking and personal information compromised.

But others give a cloak of secrecy to organizations and individuals that don’t need and hardly deserve to be allowed to lurk in the shadows.

There’s some ominous language in a number of these bills, language that could easily be exploited by someone with unscrupulous motives.

Take, for example, House Bill 185, which became law last year. It allows for an exemption of information identifying the surviving siblings living in the home of a deceased child. On the surface, it seems to protect the grieving. But dig deeper, and it’s easy to see how this law could enable an abusive family to hide children from public view. One need only harken back to the tragedy of Ronnie Simmons to realize that we can’t necessarily trust our social service workers to make sure surviving children are OK.

Or how about Senate Bill 1922, also enacted last year, which blocks records regarding complaints to, and preliminary investigations by, municipal ethics commissions. That means if your city commissioner has a half-dozen ethics complaints filed against him in a two-month span, but all are dismissed (as frequently occurs), you’ll never know about it.

The old adage about someone being innocent until proven guilty still holds, of course, but so does the one about smoke and fire. What’s wrong with giving people the facts and allowing them to decide?

Today, Florida newspapers observe the sixth annual Sunshine Sunday, which has blossomed nationally into Sunshine Week. We join our partners around the state in calling for an end to the parade of open-government restrictions.

Reproduced courtesy of the Leesburg Daily Commerical.
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