The Beacon's Opinion

posted Mar 18, 2010 - 9:49:25am

Florida newspapers call this Sunshine Week. It’s an effort to remind everyone of the importance of open government.

Citizens have a right to know what’s going on behind the scenes in their city halls — how decisions are being made, how money is being spent, how people are being treated, and whose influence is bearing on those important aspects of their local government.

To know those things, citizens and news media must have access to meetings and records. Under Florida law, we do have good access. Unfortunately, the law is often unknown, and sometimes ignored.

This year alone, The Beacon has encountered:

• The City Council member who refused to use an e-mail address based at City Hall, where his correspondence could more easily be made available to the public. He preferred to use only his personal e-mail address, and told us he deleted — without reading — any city-related e-mail that came to that personal address.

Oh, and, no, he could not provide any e-mail from his personal account on the topic we were researching.

• The Volusia County Schools employees who destroyed records of names submitted by members of the public for the new high school in Orange City.

Here’s the response to our request to see the actual record of names submitted: “The ballot boxes for ‘DDD’ were placed on a table for parent and student input. The information in both boxes was discussed by the principal and the school’s cadre. The ballots were broken down to approximately 22 names and mascots. Cadre members narrowed the list down to three possible selections. The ballots were later discarded.”

Those ballots were public records. Destroying them is a crime.

• City attorneys who interpreted the Police Officers’ Bill of Rights in Florida law to mean they could withhold just about any records having to do with the city’s Police Department, so long as an investigation involving that department was ongoing.

Records withheld included letters from a police officer’s attorney that were sent to police officers and City Council members, portions of a police officer’s personnel file, and e-mails sent by and to the police chief.

The Police Officers’ Bill of Rights comes into play when an officer is being investigated. It shields “information obtained pursuant to an investigation” so pieces of an investigation aren’t made public until the investigation is complete. The law doesn’t shield anything except records obtained pursuant to the investigation.

• Agencies that want to charge money for the time it takes to produce a public record. Large news organizations routinely pay these fees, although Florida’s open-records law allows this kind of charge only when the nature and volume of a records request requires extensive time or other resources.

Keeping records in a manner easily accessible by the public, and having systems to allow ready retrieval of those records, without extensive labor, is the duty of every governmental entity.

We strongly disagree with the trend toward charging for the labor of fulfilling most records requests. Citizens and small newspapers cannot afford these fees. Access to records must not be available only to the wealthy.

Florida’s open-government laws are good. Unfortunately, encouraging widespread respect for them is an ongoing task.

Find this article interesting? Subcribe to The DeLand-Deltona Beacon to read more opinions. Subscribe now!