Keeping information public up to citizens

Here we are in the middle of Sunshine Week, March 15-22, an annual observance sponsored by the American Society of Newspaper Editors in which newspapers around the country are encouraged to remind the public that the power to keep government open lies within our own hands.

Public records laws are not just for journalists.

As the Canton, Ohio, Repository editorialized last week, "Just ask your neighbor who needs a death certificate to close out a deceased relative's credit card accounts. Or your friend who wants to check results of health department inspections of restaurants."

Mundane as these matters might appear, public records should remain open to the public. After all, you have just as much right to that information as any journalist.

Ron Dzwonkowski, a columnist for the Detroit Free Press writing on this same issue, opines, "People who work in government don't own it. They are just temporary custodians of something that belongs to the public."

If so, then Sunshine Week also serves to remind public officials of that fact and helps make sure the people understand that it is within their authority as citizens to obtain public information.

Public records are your records as much as they are ours. You have as much right, and sometimes a bigger need, to see public documents as we journalists do.

Fortunately, state and federal laws guarantee this right even if government officials sometimes act as if those laws don't exist.

It's the same with public meetings.

You have as much right to know how business is conducted in your name as we reporters do.

A recent poll conducted by Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University showed that 73 percent of the nearly 1,000 people polled believe the federal government is secretive. About 44 percent said their state government is secretive, followed by 33 percent who said their local government is secretive.

The moral of this story is obvious: The closer government is to the people, the harder it is for government to keep secrets.

We in the media have no special powers in this regard; any citizen can request public records and use state and federal Freedom of Information laws as needed to obtain them.

During the recently-concluded George W. Bush administration, federal employees were often directed to take the attitude that government information generally was secret unless the person asking for it could make a case for shedding light on it.

President Barack Obama issued an executive order shortly after taking office that shifts the burden back where it should be, on the government to show why such information should be kept secret.

"Obama has made very public commitments in regards to government transparency. It will be interesting to see whether that message trickles down to state and local governments the way the 'button it up' attitude did during the Bush years," Dzwonkowski notes in his March 13 column.

Just how committed will Obama remain to this concept after the inevitable exposure of some wasted or mis-spent stimulus money? With $787 billion being placed into the hands of company executives and agencies that have already mismanaged their own funds, there will be problems.

You can count on it.

Other findings of interest from the aforementioned Sunshine Week survey:

37 percent say their state government is "somewhat open;" 38 percent say "somewhat secretive."

67 percent are aware of the Freedom of Information Act; 77 percent say it's a good law; but only 6 percent have ever used it to obtain information from the federal government.

42 percent believe the federal government "only sometimes" obeys the FOIA.

79 percent say Obama is "doing the right thing" by ordering all federal agencies to presume information is public.