EDITORIAL In the Sunshine State, we have a set of laws intended to assure the public’s right to know what its governments and its elected representatives are doing with our tax dollars and other public resources. It is appropriately name the Florida Sunshine Law. But now it seems, government has figured out how to block…
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BY HOWARD TROXLER We have a simple and important principle in Florida: What the government does is the public’s business. Put another way, the taxpayers of Florida have the right to know what their government is doing. Read more here.
EDITORIAL What the public sees under Florida’s Sunshine Law isn’t always pretty — but it can be critically important. Gov. Rick Scott should veto legislation restricting public access to photographs, video and audio recordings of deaths captured by police or other official recordings. No, that’s not an argument to routinely display them on television or…
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Claiming a “tremendous increase in public records requests” that are taking “a great toll on existing information technology and other labor resources,” the office of Gov. Rick Scott recently announced a new policy establishing procedures and fees for responding to requests for copies of public documents. Purportedly to reduce the cost to taxpayers in general…
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BY PATRICIA MAZZEI TALLAHASSEE — Don’t tell U.S. Rep. Frederica Wilson that videos of murders should be kept from the public. The video of the brutal death of 14-year-old Martin Lee Anderson at the hands of security guards at a juvenile boot camp in 2006 prompted Wilson and other lawmakers to close all of the…
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BY DOMINIC M. CALABRO We at Florida TaxWatch hold dear the independent, unfiltered manner of government entities placing public notices in local newspapers of record. If House Bill 89, which proposes moving public notices to government-run websites, would save a great deal of taxpayer money, Florida TaxWatch would have been a vocal proponent. No one…
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In an interview Thursday, Mr. Scott said one thing that surprised him was the power of the state’s “sunshine” law. “My emails became public record the moment I won the election,” he said. “I never thought about that.” Read more here.