From the Asheville Citizen-Times (3/18/10): The annual observance of Sunshine Week is upon us, and with it an opportunity to judge how well public officials from Washington on down — officials paid for with our tax dollars, we'd point out — are exercising the openness that should be a priority for all public servants.
Sunshine Week was started by journalists in Florida in 2002 after legislators attempted to erect sweeping exemptions to that state’s public records laws. In the years since, the initiative has spread across the nation, involving citizens as well as journalists.
That’s as it should be, as government affects the quality of our lives, not to mention the thickness of our wallets. Keeping tabs on government is not a liberal issue, or conservative or libertarian; it’s everybody’s issue.
Here in North Carolina the record on government openness is decidedly mixed.
Certainly, there appears to be quite an improvement regarding openness in the governor’s office with the election of Bev Perdue. But considering her predecessor, Mike Easley, flouted openness laws by deleting e-mails, keeping a secret e-mail account, etc., there was almost nowhere to go but up.
The state’s openness laws are well-crafted, unless specifically exempted by law. Records and communications are deemed public records. A gaping loophole in openness comes with state personnel law, which restricts disclosure of all but the most rudimentary information such as when a public employee was hired, what they’re currently being paid and their most recent job status change.
Anyone in government disclosing other information to the public can actually face criminal charges.
As reported by the News & Observer of Raleigh, this can lead to some astonishing conundrums in state government. Facing a spate of cases of misconduct by state troopers, many involving allegations of sordid behavior such as sexual coercion, the patrol hired an independent consultant, Kroll, to examine the patrol’s hiring, training and supervisory policies. But Kroll was barred from looking at the misconduct cases because of the personnel law.
Hopefully some good came from Kroll’s work, but it’s not hard to wonder if the state could’ve gotten more bang from the $100,000 spent on this if Kroll could have seen relevant files.
The N&O also noted the case of Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officer Marcus Jackson, accused of sexually assaulting six women while making traffic stops on duty. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg police department isn’t making his personnel file public, so we don’t know if he has faced disciplinary action in the past.
The state’s personnel laws, crafted back in the 1970s, appear to be unlike any other state’s in the nation. Back when he was in the General Assembly 13 years ago, current N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper attempted to loosen the laws to give the public information about employees who had been disciplined, suspended or fired, but the effort fell short. We hope a new champion emerges to address this glaring problem this session.
On the national front, President Obama’s administration, one that came in promising much on the openness front, has been a disappointment. On his first day in office, the president issued orders calling for federal agencies to hew more closely to the Freedom of Information Act by adopting a presumption favoring disclosure regarding FOIA requests. That order, a welcome one, reversed rule in place since 2001. However, a review released earlier this week from the National Security Archive at George Washington University show only a handful — four of 28 — federal agencies receiving FOIA requests had more releases of information and fewer denials.
And one doesn’t have to look far to find levels of secrecy that are ludicrous. This week, the CIA released internal documents regarding treatment of terrorist detainees in response to a FOIA lawsuit filed by the ACLU. The documents included a letter send by three members of Congress to then-President Bush; in that letter, one paragraph was completely blacked out by the CIA. Thing is, the letter was released in its entirety in 2007. In fact, it’s still available in its entirety on the Web site of one of the letter’s signers, Rep. Ed Markey.
So yes, there’s a lot of work to be done at the state and national level. Spring is almost here, and a lot of us are looking to work ourselves back into shape. Our public officials need to recognize that their openness muscles are a bit flabby, and could use a lot more exercise.
We should all demand nothing less.
Asheville Citizen-Times Staff Editorial