Healthy government thrives only in abundant sunshine

This is Sunshine Week, the sixth annual observance of an event that gets a lot less attention than St. Patrick’s Day or Mardi Gras, which also come around about the same time each year.

Sunshine Week was founded by journalists to promote the idea of open government, but somehow hasn’t caught on with the public the way its seasonal competitors have. Perhaps because no strings of plastic beads are involved. There are no parades. No beer or corned beef is consumed in honor of sunshine. But mostly, we suspect that people see Sunshine Week as an inside-baseball kind of thing, something important to journalists, but of very little concern to the average person.

Nothing could be further from the truth. While it is true that most open meetings and open records fights are pursued by the press, it’s the people who win or lose based on how opened or closed their government operations are.

Ohio has pretty good open meetings and open records laws on the books. When written, they called for government entities to operate under a presumption that a meeting was open or a record was public. But in practice, many government entities tend to turn that rule on its head. When dealing with sensitive issues, they operate from a starting point that it is the responsibility of the people or the press to prove that Ohio’s Sunshine Law applies. We’ve seen elected officials go to extraordinary lengths and construct tortured explanations for why it was OK for them to conduct behind closed doors what should have been a public meeting. They believe it’s easier to get things done quietly, without the public getting in the way, and so they look for ways to accomplish that end.

And there is always some special interest pushing the Legislature to close one of the doors that the Sunshine Law intends to be open. Of course, it’s presented as in the public’s best interest.

The 911 dilemma

One such effort now involves legislation that would declare 911 tape recordings off limits. This is presented as an effort to protect the privacy of individuals who call the local police or fire department at a time of need. And that is a seductive argument. We’ve all cringed at some of the recordings we’ve heard, and it is incumbent on news outlets to weigh the news value of every piece of tape they air.

On the other hand, there is more on 911 tapes than heartache, pain and pathos. These tapes provide an insight into how public safety forces — paid for with tax dollars — are doing their jobs. A tape from Texas during which a frantic mother asked time after time for guidance in resuscitating her child, only to be told by the dispatcher to calm down and wait for an emergency crew, has raised serious questions about the level of training in some public safety departments. More recently and closer to home, a Youngstown 911 tape caught a dispatcher and a police officer conducting a light-hearted conversation about a handicapped man’s complaint that he had been mistreated by a police officer at the scene of an accident.

The public should not be so quick to accept that it is in their best interest to allow government to function in secret, whatever official rationale is offered to the contrary.

The state’s open meetings and open records laws were championed by highly principled public officials and the fight to get those laws passed was spirited. Dismantling those laws, piece by piece, is an easier task.

Sunshine Week is a time for us to point that out, with the hope that people see that they only have control over their government as long as they have a window into how that government works.