St. Augustine Record

Public access laws face constant threat of dilution

Today is Sunshine Sunday. Each year the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors asks its member newspapers to set aside this day to remind our readers – and quite frankly ourselves – of how important our open government laws are to a free society. Florida’s Sunshine Law was first enacted in 1967. Later, in 1992 our citizens spoke again, enacting a Constitutional Amendment that integrated many of the protections granted in the original law.

Florida is a leader nationwide in its laws that protect the public’s right to know about all things political - that their taxes bankroll. Every year more and more assaults are made on this right by legislators, usually on behalf of one special interest or another that believes in open records – except in its own particular case. This year, as in every year, several bills are filed to protect the privacy rights of one group or another. The bills seek to exclude home addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers and even the names of day care facilities and schools the children of these threatened groups attend. We understand the need for this kind of protection for some – law enforcement comes quickly to mind. But two separate bills filed for 2006 seek to exempt Code Enforcement Officers and Human Resource Directors from this kind of disclosure. What’s next? Septic tank installers and house-sitters?

Still, Florida turns back much of this nonsense and remains an example to other states in its accessibility to records. Too often we – newspaper people and tax-paying citizens alike – take this for granted. That point was driven home this week when we telephoned the manager of the Latrobe (Pennsylvania) Municipal Authority. This is the counterpart of our own county utility department. It is also the entity that sells water to the Le Nature’s bottling plant there. The plant is owned by the same group that has been given permission to set up a similar plant here.

We asked a couple of questions about the amount of water that plant uses, and about the quality of its discharge. “Can’t tell you that,” said the manager. Maybe he didn’t understand the question, we thought, so it was asked again, more clearly this time. The answer was the same. We countered that the Municipal Authority was a government entity, built by taxpayer money. You can’t, we explained, withhold information on a publicly-owned utility. The answer came back, “but we’re withholding information on a privately-owned customer.” End of conversation.

That would never happen in our state, and it’s helpful to be reminded of that in so clear a way from time to time.

That said, the attacks on open records continue at a dismaying pace in Florida’s Legislature. Today state statutes include over 1,000 individual exemptions to the Sunshine Law – some understandable, some bewildering and some are just silly.

Here’s a favorite example. Some years ago a bill was proposed ostensibly to ensure that licensed veterinarians were giving rabies shots. It’s important to know that the sponsoring House member was, himself, a vet. At the end of the bill language was tacked on to exempt from public records the names of the owners of vaccinated pets. The real reason for this was that direct marketers of pet supplies were using the names to sell discount pills and services – heartworm pills, for example. This was nothing but a clear effort to protect vets’ turf and wallets. The bill passed both the House and Senate on “legal” grounds that publishing the names of owners violated the confidentiality rights of the pets in the doctor/patient relationship. This is actually true.

This year there are nearly 90 bills pending which either dilute open records laws, or reaffirm earlier exemptions which sunset every five years. These are monitored by the state’s First Amendment Foundation which updates newspapers and other interested parties as they move through the legislative process. You’ll hear about the important ones on these pages as they clear committees and head toward an actual vote.

Closer to home, county voters will become the beneficiaries of open records laws come November when we – or you - are able to monitor and track the source of campaign contributions on the Supervisor of Elections web site. And campaign contributions, it seems clear, will be perhaps THE issue as the 2006 elections unfold locally.

Reproduced courtesy of the St. Augustine Record.
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