Florida Times-Union

The Open Government Office was busy before it was even unpacked

By J. TAYLOR RUSHING, Capital Bureau Chief

TALLAHASSEE - Within hours of new governor Charlie Crist pledging to open the doors of state government like never before, people starting taking him up on it.

“The phones started ringing that afternoon,” said JoAnn Carrin, director of the Open Government Office. “We still had things packed in boxes and we didn’t even have a dedicated phone line for the office yet.”

Crist created the office Jan. 3 with his first executive order on his first full day in office.

Within 10 weeks, the office has become one of the highest-profile features of Crist’s short time in office. The governor has established a Web site specifically for open government tasks, started training state agency leaders on how to better respond to requests, and eliminated barriers in the process that were blocking information.

“This just struck me as the right thing to do,” Crist said. “It’s an issue I’ve been passionate about and cared about it for a long time.”

The change is getting a warm reception after years of what some said was a closed-door mindset.

“The governor has shined a light on an issue that’s very important to all citizens and it’s something we didn’t have before,” said Adria Harper, director of the Tallahassee-based First Amendment Foundation.

Harper said a common complaint in the past was from those who said they felt intimidated.

“Like being sent several places for information,” Harper said. “Imagine that, if you’re a regular citizen making a request for the first time.”

Open-record requests come mostly from average people, with a smaller percentage coming from journalists. Typical requests recently include transcripts of meetings by the state commission examining capital punishment in Florida, information on the state budget and investigations by the inspector general. People also use the new office for help and advice obtaining records at the local government level.

The contrast between Crist and Bush is inevitable and unavoidable, since the former governor was widely known in Tallahassee for building bottlenecks that slowed the flow of public access to a trickle, such as short-staffing his press office. Bush also ordered all open record requests to go through his general counsel’s office, a time-consuming step that Crist eliminated.

“It’s like night and day,” said Lance deHaven-Smith, a Florida State University professor of public administration and policy. “It took months to get answers back, and most of the time you couldn’t get people in the agencies to talk to you.”

Bush did not respond to a request for comment. Crist did not criticize the previous administration’s approach.

“Everybody has their own style, and I would never make the argument that one is better than another,” he said. “We’re just different.”

Another change in state government’s openness came this month in a courtroom in Fort Myers when a Lee County judge was handling a case in which two parents were arrested and charged with child abuse and neglect. Prosecutors said the couple’s six children were kept locked in rooms or closets, feeding on scraps and sometimes forced to sleep outdoors.

Crist told the state Department of Children and Families, which had been handling the case and has traditionally guarded its records in such cases, to join a newspaper’s lawsuit to ask a judge to allow release of the records.

DCF Secretary Bob Butterworth said he has ordered the agency’s districts throughout the state to adopt the new attitude.

“There are certain confidentialities that are required by law that we will respect,” Butterworth said, “but DCF is going to be as transparent as any agency can be and we never want to protect this agency from public scrutiny.”

Crist said he sees the office’s mission as twofold: serving people and the news media and training state agencies on how to improve their processes.

“I want to lead by example and use the bully pulpit that the people were kind enough to give me,” he said.

Reproduced courtesy of the Florida Times-Union.
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