This week is Sunshine Week, an annual celebration of transparency laws, which means that government press offices across the country are hard at work pretending they don't spend the other 51 weeks a year undermining those transparency laws.
If you want to see what your leaders really think of you and your statutory right to know what they're up to, just ask them to comply with the open government laws on the books.
Two Florida Department of Law Enforcement officers claimed earlier this month that Gov. Ron DeSantis' office blocked the release of DeSantis' publicly-funded travel records and retaliated against them for arguing that the records were public under the state's Sunshine Law.
As I wrote last year for Reason's special issue on Florida, politicians have been chipping away at the state's vaunted public records law for decades, but DeSantis and his allies in the Florida Legislature are taking a sledgehammer to it.
Elsewhere in the Sunshine State, a fire chief called the police because a local reporter had the temerity to insist, correctly, that he had a legal right to inspect public records in person. Tampa Bay Times reporter Jason Garcia showed up at the headquarters of the Tampa Fire Rescue Department asking to see paperwork related to a firefighter's termination. Florida's Sunshine Law law is unambiguous on this point: "All state, county and municipal records are open for personal inspection and copying by any person."
Nevertheless, two department employees, one of whom was the personnel chief, argued Garcia had no right to see the records since he'd already filed a records request online. Eventually, Tampa fire chief Barbara Tripp called the police to report Garcia for causing a disturbance, although he left by the time reinforcements arrived to end his reign of terror.
The personnel chief claimed in a memo that Garcia "persisted in being argumentative and repetitive and refused to accept the answer and leave."
"No matter how you want to spin it, though, journalists are supposed to ask questions and seek explanations," the Tampa Bay Times wrote in an editorial about the alleged hullabaloo. "That may rankle people in power, but it doesn't constitute an unruly disturbance."
Meanwhile in Virginia, a former Richmond government employee filed a whistleblower retaliation lawsuit earlier this month alleging that city officials told her to intentionally delay and stonewall Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. The former employee claims she was fired "in retaliation for reporting and refusing to engage in illegal and unethical activities in violation of FOIA."
The lawsuit came shortly after local news outlet CBS 6 reported that Richmond is regularly not meeting FOIA deadlines and sometimes ignoring requests altogether.
If you want to see more government gone wild, you can peruse the Electronic Frontier Foundation's annual Foilies, ignominious "awards" for public record violations and abuses.
The reason that government offices get away with flouting record laws is that there is no one to hold them accountable and few consequences in the rare instances that they are scolded.
An Associated Press survey of all 50 U.S. states, released yesterday for Sunshine Week, found that fewer than a third of states have offices to handle Freedom of Information appeals and force agencies to comply with the law.
"In most states, the only meaningful option for residents to resolve complaints about agencies wrongfully withholding public records is to file costly lawsuits," the AP wrote.
These ombudsmen and other positions provide crucial layers of oversight. Without them, agencies know that they can delay and frivolously deny requests with little resistance, and even if they lose a lawsuit, the only consequence is usually a small fine, paid for with taxpayer dollars, naturally.
"It shows that we have a problem in the United States. We have these laws, but there's really a lack of enforcement," says David Cuillier, director of the Joseph L. Brechner Freedom of Information Project at the University of Florida, which coordinates Sunshine Week. "The system's stacked against the average person. It's not fair that they have to hire an attorney and take all that time and money to just make sure the law's followed. Who can afford $10,000, $20,000 to do that? Not the average person."
If you want a transparent, responsive government, one place to start is by demanding the creation of independent offices to resolve public records disputes outside of costly courtroom battles. Without them, the statutes are, just like government press releases, a lot of empty promises.
The post Without More Accountability, Sunshine Laws Are Toothless appeared first on Reason.com.
