From Hendersonville Times-News (12/31/08): As plainly worded and strongly supported as they are, North Carolina’s open government laws are too often ignored, skirted and flouted by local and state government.
How else does one explain the refusal by the town of Fletcher last summer to say how much it had paid its embattled police chief, Langdon Raymond, as it showed him the door.
How else does one explain Fletcher’s refusal to release all the reports, investigations and evaluations of its police department (paid for by taxpayers), despite intense public interest in the management of the local law enforcement agency.
How else does one explain the state attorney general’s seal of pending drunken driving cases in Johnston County while the Raleigh News & Observer was trying to review the files for improper dismissals.
These are the kinds of records that North Carolinians are entitled to, by law, and yet too often newspapers or civic activists are denied access. The law is on the side of the openness and many state Supreme Court decisions come down decisively toward openness. The Johnston County case notwithstanding, Attorney General Roy Cooper has been a defender of open government.
As Cooper points out in the new Guide to Open Government and Public Records, the state Supreme Court has set forth guidelines that “the Public Records Act is to be read liberally in favor of public access to records and information, and exemptions from the Act’s mandatory disclosure requirement are to be read narrowly.”
The North Carolina General Assembly has declared it a matter of public policy that records and information compiled by the government belong to the people, and it has declared that the hearings, deliberations and actions of public bodies are to be conducted in the open.
The law is straightforward enough but too often in practice it is ignored or misinterpreted to keep public matters from the public. That’s why we hope open government and open records will be a priority for the General Assembly this year. The state has no money to spend, and will be in a budget-cutting mode when it convenes in January. Making our open government laws stronger costs nothing yet serves all the people.
This newspaper and others across the state hope the state will take up the automatic recovery bill, which lets courts award attorney fees to plaintiffs that win open records and open meetings lawsuits against local and state agencies. The bill passed the Senate overwhelmingly last session but was bottled up in the House by Speaker Joe Hackney.
The automatic recovery bill would make cities and counties and state agencies pause before fighting public records requests or meeting in secret for dubious reasons. It’s a simple way for the Legislature to endorse good government. It would put some much needed teeth in our open government law.