The Value of Transparency

By Charles Davis

Once a year, thanks to the national celebration known as Sunshine Week – a tribute to government openness that traces its origins to the Sunshine State – we take a moment to consider the value of transparency.

From my position as executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition – the national organization of state FOI groups – I can attest to the difficulty of convincing folks of the importance of access to government records and meetings.

Let’s face it: FOI can be a tough sell in a news budget filled with politics, crime, schools and taxes. Yet without access to information, we know less and less about what our governments are doing in our names.

My phone rings daily, with callers across the nation looking for help on FOI issues. More often than not, the caller is not a reporter, but a homeowner, a parent, a businessperson or a student. Many began with no idea that such a thing as freedom of information laws even existed. They simply found themselves, through some combination of life events, in need of some record held by their government. A distinct minority of the callers seek help with controversial records that raise tough legal questions; the vast majority are struggling to obtain the most basic information, clearly public under any state’s laws.

Perhaps a homeowner in rural Virginia who awakened one morning to find a municipal survey crew traipsing through his backyard, or it’s a landlord in Tennessee who is finding it nearly impossible to get the incident reports from local police who may or may not have been called to one of his rental properties. Today, the call came from a retiree in Arkansas interested in obtaining land use documents from his county government.

None of them likely stopped to consider the deeper democratic theory at play when they sought access to government information. They probably didn’t think twice about how they were exercising their rights as citizens of a representative democracy to oversee their elected and appointed representatives. They simply needed the information, asked for it politely and were met by delay or outright denial.

In an era marked by low levels of civic participation and high levels of cynicism about the role of government, imagine the cumulative effect of these interactions on the citizenry. These callers are not reporters rewarded for their tenacity. They are everyday people with legitimate requests for information and their experience leaves them dispirited and convinced that government is an obstacle to be overcome rather than a representative of their interests.

All is not lost, however, and during this Sunshine Week, there is much to cheer about. Across the nation, in Washington State and Iowa and Tennessee and in the United States Congress, FOI reform is in the air.

State FOI coalitions, working with bipartisan support, are rewriting state laws, improving the request process and adding teeth to the enforcement of open government laws. There is a sense that the pendulum has swung too far toward secrecy, that transparent government is good government, and that while there are legitimate occasions for governmental secrecy, closed doors and secret documents should be the exception and not the rule.

More than a dozen states – from West Virginia to Delaware to Pennsylvania to Nevada – have started FOI groups in just the past three years, as the FOI movement has grown to 48 states strong. The goal is to change the conversation about openness, to make FOI a core political value that transcends partisanship.

Florida is, in many ways, the model that all the other states wish to emulate in some fashion. Look at what Florida has going for it: its thriving Florida First Amendment Foundation, its academic leadership from the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information and Citizen Access Project at the University of Florida. Is it any wonder that Florida’s open government laws are national models, or that its current governor is a champion of openness?

This Sunshine Week, Floridians should be thankful for their hard-earned rights to open government, and should take heart in knowing that what began in the Sunshine State is now a full-fledged national movement.

Working together, we can ensure that citizens across the nation gain the rights that Floridians have long enjoyed, and guard against further secrecy.

Charles N. Davis, who earned his doctorate at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communication, is executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition, headquartered at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in Columbia, Mo.

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