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Northwest Florida Daily News Last year, after it was revealed that Air Force officials had considered giving a chunk of Okaloosa Island beachfront to a developer in return for land elsewhere, a lot of folks who’d never thought much about open government probably realized that openness is a pretty good idea. Indeed it is. A little more openness from Eglin officials — one of whom dismissed the very real land-swap discussions as just “uninformed gossip” — would have let the public know what was going on with public land. Instead, for too long, citizens were kept in the dark. For most government officials, keeping citizens in the dark is a hard habit to break. Every legislative session, Florida lawmakers propose new exemptions designed to weaken the state’s open-meetings and public-records laws. Every day, federal agencies find new ways to keep material classified and vital information hidden. The American Society of Newspaper Editors has designated March 12-18 as Sunshine Week, a nationwide effort to raise public awareness about the value of open government. We hope our elected officials — local, state and federal — will bring more of the public’s business out of the shadows. Reproduced courtesy of the Northwest Florida Daily
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