Al's Morning Meeting

The Norwich (Conn.) Bulletin opened its Sunshine Week coverage with a piece about how wildly cities and counties differ in the way they post public information online. The Bulletin said:

Today is the start of national Sunshine Week, an effort by media around the country to shed light on the public's right to know. The first effort was launched March 13, 2005.

"This is not just an issue for the press. It's an issue for the public," said Cox Newspapers' Washington Bureau Chief Andy Alexander, chairman of the American Society of Newspaper Editors' Freedom of Information Committee. "An alarming amount of public information is being kept secret from citizens, and the problem is increasing by the month. Not only do citizens have a right to know, they have a need to know."

Most records can be found in the town clerk's office in each town, although other individual government departments also store data to which the public has access.
 

Municipalities are required, under the state's Freedom of Information law, to make town records available, but the law does not require access be available over the Internet.

In Florida, journalists checked to see how open the state's "open records" are. The answer was not encouraging. The Tallahassee Democrat said:

News-media volunteers visited city, county, school-district and law-enforcement offices last month to test their compliance with Florida's open-records law, one of the strongest in the country -- on paper.
 

Almost half of the agencies failed.
 

Big Bend agencies were among the worst violators, the audit found.
 

"We wanted to see what happened when the average citizen goes in and makes a public-records request," said Barbara Petersen, the president of the Tallahassee-based First Amendment Foundation, which educates citizens and government officials about the Sunshine Law and organized the audit.
 

The results: "pretty dismal," she said. That's despite the promises state and local officials made two years ago, when the results of the first audit were released.
 

"The results are disappointing," said Pat Gleason, the general counsel for Florida's attorney general. "We'll have to redouble our efforts."

The Flint (Mich.) Journal got really local to point out why open records matter:

If not for the Freedom of Information Act, people may never have learned that a retired county department head was poised to receive a record $99,000-a-year pension.
 

Or that 21 county school buildings may have had too much arsenic in their drinking water.

Or that the city of Flint spent $11.9 million on outside attorneys over a six-year span. Or that thousands of taxpayer dollars had been spent on splashy out-of-town trips for county school administrators.
 

It's all there in public documents for anyone to see.
 

"I think it's a good check because it makes us realize that when you work for the public, everything you do can be viewed by the public," said Clio Police Chief James McLellan.

"That's who we're accountable to. How can they hold us accountable if they don't see what we do? It makes you be credible."
 

It may seem like only journalists would celebrate national Sunshine Week, which begins Monday and recognizes the importance of public access to government.
 

But defenders of FOIA, also known as the "sunshine" law, and the Michigan Open Meetings Act say open government is not for the media: It's for citizens.

The Arizona Daily Star (Tucson, Ariz.) used a recent series of investigative stories to point out in an editorial why open records are important:

Southern Arizona had a record-setting year for the number of fatal and near-fatal workplace accidents in our community; 13 men died while working at construction sites, in farm fields and in manufacturing plants last year.
 

Without access to state and federal records, the Star could not have told that story Feb. 12. Nor could we have used that data as a springboard to discuss the reasons for the incidents and what is being done to improve workplace safety.

The Star's piece went on to explain:

Freedom of information brings to light issues that have an impact on our daily lives. The warning label on a bottle of aspirin that you may give your child was the result of Food and Drug Administration-released studies on aspirin and Reye's syndrome in children in 1982.
 

In 2005, The Associated Press reported on the risks of blood clots believed related to a birth-control patch by obtaining federal drug-safety reports under the Freedom of Information Act.
 

When government refuses to hand over records to an average citizen, that's often the end of the road. Few people can afford to hire lawyers to go toe-to-toe with our government. That's one place where the media can and does play an important role. We can muster the money to sue for access to important records.
 

In a big case in the news recently, The Associated Press did exactly that. It sued to obtain transcripts from hundreds of hearings at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay. A federal judge ruled in the AP's favor, and on March 3 the Pentagon released 5,000 pages of records from at least 317 hearings.
 

Sometimes the media sues to uphold the principle of open records even if the documents don't uncover an important story.
 

That's what happened in 2000, when several Tucson Police Department officers were photographed nearly naked while on duty. The officers said the photo was a private prank and their bosses refused to release it on grounds that it was embarrassing.
 

The story was readily told without the photo, but the Star and other local media outlets sued. The state Court of Appeals agreed with us that what public officials do on taxpayer time is a public record. The photo was released, although the Star never published it.

U.S. News & World Report's Sunshine Week coverage includes a neat story on "Finding out what Uncle Sam has on you." The magazine says:

The U.S. Freedom of Information Act is approaching its 40th birthday. Given that March 12 begins national Sunshine Week -- an effort to cast light onto the growing recesses of government secrecy -- U.S. News is providing links so its readers can file requests for federal records under the FOIA and its sister statute, the Privacy Act. The process is surprisingly simple.

Since the original U.S. act in 1966, more than 55 nations have passed freedom of information laws. Still, in too many countries, experts say, the presumption is that all records are secret until officials deem otherwise. In contrast, the U.S legislation, as generally interpreted, presumes that all government records should be public -- unless officials can show very good reasons to exempt them, such as for protecting national security or law enforcement sources. If citizens are not satisfied, they can take the government to court and ask a judge to decide.

Here's an online guide to obtaining information:

•  The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has an easy-to-use FOI letter generator, for general requests under the Freedom of Information Act: Automatic FOI Letter Generator.
• For files about themselves, individuals should make requests under the Privacy Act. Here are relevant forms from the Freedom of Information Center at the University of Missouri's School of Journalism.
  
• Although access varies, every state now has open meetings or open records laws. Here's a handy guide.

Often the records can be obtained by simply asking for them, but since 9/11, federal agencies have grown increasingly stubborn about what they release. In U.S. News's interview with secrecy watchdog Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists (www.fas.org), Aftergood warned that the FOIA is under attack.

The Morning News (Springdale, Ark.) said, in an opinion piece:

According to the Sunshine Week Web site, the federal government now spends $148 creating new classified documents for every $1 spent on declassifying old papers. The site also notes the decline the in the number of documents declassified each year, down to 44 million pages in 2004 from more than 100 million in 2001.

While these numbers mean little to the average person, consider that there are literally trillions of documents maintained by the government and many of them are classified for no justifiable reason.

The Coalition of Journalists for Open Government found that less information is being released in FOIA requests.

Here is a big collection of other Sunshine Week stories.

Unsafe Dams

In keeping with the spirit of journalists using government records well, The Dover (Ohio) Times Reporter sounded the warning over an aging local dam.

IRE, the organization of Investigative Reporters & Editors, has a collection of just under 80,000 dam-inspection records online.

Cheerleaders Restricted

Here is a follow-up to a story Al's Morning included last week. Just as the basketball playoff season cranks up, an organization that oversees cheerleading-safety guidelines is now limiting what routines cheerleaders may perform. The new rules are a response to a serious injury a cheerleader suffered last week.

Some schools are going to comply with the new guidelines, some aren't. See the story from the Associated Press.

"Toothing": A Prank Becomes a Dating Practice

It is a new way to hook up. See the story from WiredNews.com