SURVEYS OF OPEN GOVERNMENT NOW HAVE BEEN MADE IN 26 STATES

By Tom Bennett 

     Atlanta, Oct. 2004 -- Surveys measure sunshine, and they're the biggest trend in open government.  The latest have taken place in far-flung corners of the U.S.,  in Alabama in 2003 and Maine and South Dakota in 2002.

      Here's how their leaders describe how they  became freedom of information champions,  guiding their states into the U.S. freedom of information survey movement.

     "Our opportunity in Alabama came when a group of concerned journalists ganged up on me and asked me to provide the leadership to get an FOI organization going,"  said Ed Mullins, chairman of the Department of Journalism at the University of Alabama.

    "ALACOG then joined forces this year with the AP to conduct the largest statewide records survey in U.S. history.   "The results of this exercise have been to galvanize the state's media on behalf of FOI, to educate many public officials to get the message to the public about its rights to information and to get openness on the public agenda."

    Tena Haraldson is AP's chief of bureau for South and North Dakota, "I think an interest in freedom of information has always been thre, as long as I have reported, back to college in 1972," Haraldson said. "I can't say I really became active until I had been to a National Freedom of Information Coalition meeting in Dallas in the early nineties. When reporting you run into it all the time.  You're aware of it, but not attuned to how you can bring it to the public attention. NFOIC did a lot to clarify that for me."

    Judy Meyer is  editorial page editor of the Lewiston, Maine, Sun Journal.   "When I was reporting, there was a particular instance about ten years ago," she recalled.  "There was an electrocution death, and an investigation.  The mother would call the ME's office daily wanting the autopsy report, and each time she would be told it wasn't available. That went on for six or seven months.  "Finally one day I called following up and I got a copy of the autopsy report FAXED to me within minutes.  The mother read about that in the paper the next day, and she called and she was crying.  I saw how unbelievably unfair it is for us in the press to have special access." 

     Mullins' Alabama volunteers surveyed 623 agencies;  Haraldson's in South Dakota 330;  and Meyer's in Maine 310.  All published compelling reprints alerting their states to the need for greater compliance . (You can read these reports at http://foi.missouri.edu/openrecseries.html)

    In a six-year blitz, 26 states have carried out open-government surveys since 1997.  In addition, there have been limited surveys in three other states. Why not in yours?

      Surveys uncover public officials who are behaving like "secrecy czars," said Frosty Landon, executive director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government.  "Audits remind public officials – and the public – of FOI rights and responsibilities," said Landon.  "Open-government laws are citizen-rights laws; without such laws, secrecy czars cover up policy mistakes and corrupt officials cover up their own lawlessness.

    "Sheriffs and police departments are supposed to be law enforcers, yet audits often show they're the biggest violators of even the weakest of rules for access and accountability. Citizens must be assured easy access to unarguably public records.

    "With continuous FOI training – and that's what audits should be all about – public officials (even at the police station) will soon discover that open government is good policy and good politics."

STUDENTS IGNITE GREATER DEMOCRACY 

     Seventeen students in Professor Linda Levin's Public Affairs Reporting class at the University of Rhode Island in 1997 launched an era of heightened democracy in U.S. local government.   They traveled to every R.I. city and town and requested four documents,  including police brutality reports.  The compliance rates varied from 100 percent for city clerks to 35 percent for the police.

     There is a published record of their survey and it is a remarkable document,   "Access to Public Records: An Audit of Rhode Island's Cities and Towns." It is worth reading on the FOI Center's site to study the students' accounts of their often harrowing visits to the R.I.  police. 

     That same year, Kyle Niederpruem achieved a milestone of her own. The Indianapolis Star-News environmental writer and national sunshine chair for SPJ brought together the Indiana newspapers. She convinced them to work together on an open-government survey. At the time, it stunned other U.S. editors to see the papers in a state working together on a project, even carrying each other's bylines.

   "Here's what the Indiana survey accomplished," said Larry Lough, editor of the Muncie Star-Press and his state's SPJ sunshine chair.

n "A public understanding about the press responsibility to monitor public access laws;
n "A public awareness that public access laws are routinely violated by government employees; and
n "A public access counselor (first by executive order, then by statute) for the state to address problems uncovered in the audit."

FOLLOW-UP AND MEANINGFUL CHANGE 

     In nine states where a reprint has been produced, or at least an AP story survives on the Missouri Center site, and one or the other can be opened and read, and contains an unanbiguous tally of results, we know this happened:   2,803 public officials were asked face-to-face for public records,  and they could no longer deny or ignore that their states have open records laws.

     In Indiana, Gov. Frank O'Bannon appointed Anne Mullin O'Connor the state's public access counselor. An example of her impartiality is that in July 2002, her office found her husband, Indianapolis deputy mayor Michael O'Connor, in violation of the Indiana open records law.

     "I recuse myself from any Indianapolis matters," Anne O'Connor recalled. "There was a situation where someone made a request and he didn't respond in a timely manner.  My staff attorney wrote an opinion that he violated the law."

   In Virginia, the 1998 survey's record of poor compliance aided a study commission already in place.  The FOI law was overhauled in 1999.  A full-time state ombudsman's office was set up in 2000 and it has written more than 100 opinions.

SURVEYS YEAR BY YEAR (26) 

    1997,  Indiana and Rhode Island; 1998,  Pennsylvania and Virginia; 1999, Arkansas, Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, New Jersey, South Carolina and Wisconsin; 2000,  California, Colorado, Iowa, Maryland, Minnesota and Oklahoma;  2001, Arizona, Massachusetts, Ohio, Washington state and West Virginia;  2002, Maine and South Dakota; and 2003, Alabama.

LIMITED SURVEYS (3) 

  1998,  Corpus Christi, Tex., Caller-Times; 1999,  Missouri state auditor's survey by mail; and 2001, Univ. of Mississippi students' and Miss. AP's  surveys of jail logs and a police report in 36 counties.

SURVEY VOLUME 

   From education reporter Jay Young's one-man survey of 40 agencies in Altoona, Pa., in 2001 to the 623 surveys in all 67 counties by 178 persons in Alabama in 2003.

SURVEY CONCLUSIONS 

    Police, sheriffs, jailers and school superintendents permit inspection and copying of documents as little as half the time. Theirs are the agencies upon which SPJ Project Open Door, the F.O.I. coalitions and NFOIC, and the AP news councils should concentrate their education efforts in this decade.
   
 RECORD TYPES SOUGHT IN SURVEYS 

    A typical survey is for about six record types, but the variety is tremendous, for example:

Amount spent on lawyers
Athletic director's  salary
Building permits
Campus crime log
City agenda
City budget
City council minutes
City expenses
City finance officer's  salary
Coach's contract
County administrator's latest travel voucher
County commission minutes
Comm. chairman's property tax assessment
County expenses
County judge's campaign contribution report
County per diem payments
Gun records
Jail log
911 emergency system records
Nursing home reports
Police brutality reports
Police incident and offense reports
Police radio logs
Principal's salary
Property tax records
Pupil expulsion records
Race and gender breakdown of university faculty
Restaurant inspections
School district budget
Sheriff expense reports
Sheriff incident and offense reports
Sheriff reports of deaths in custody
School superintendent's contract
School superintendent's latest evaluation
School test scores
State senators' driving records

WHAT SURVEYS ACCOMPLISH

n Reporters and officials learn to distinguish between the state sunshine law and the federal FOIA -- except in states like Arkansas and Virginia, where the law is called, guess what, the Freedom of Information Act.
n Surveys expose shameful  spoon-feeding arrangements knuckled under to by capitulating media.  With a survey, a wider world can penetrate.  The town is not sufficiently  remote.
n Surveys break stalemates.  A public employee has sworn to co-workers never to talk to that reporter again.   Now a surveyor, a third party, presents an opportunity  to surrender records while saving face.
n Police get chances to show they are responsive to citizens. They are cooperating with the FBI's National Incident-Based Reporting System, or NIBRS, adopting modern record-keeping.   Mayberry stereotypes are shattered.
n The seed is planted for younger city employees with tech skills to move  into the gatekeeper roles.  
n Surveyors and surveyed get trained in the statutes. Each avoided reading them for years, but now each is studying word-for-word.
n Conversation about the changes in the law in the legislative session begins.  Annual monitoring of it commences.
n Strongholds of secrecy in the state are identified so now you can know where votes against reform are likely to originate.
n What happens in a survey is news, and at last an FOI news blackout is broken. Otherwise, the most punitive access-killing measure in a legislature won't make the papers, because the desks are fearful of appearing self-surveying.
n A snapshot of FOI benefits journalism graduates. They need to go to a town where they can get records.  Only then can they write hard stories and move up in their careers.
n Courageous local editors who long have upheld FOI,  lived by it, are buttressed to an extent they wondered if they ever would be.  
n Vigorous access to public information,  including police open records, affords families greater security.  There is an enhanced quality of life. 

Tom Bennet of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is secretary of the Georgia First Amendment Foundation and Ga. sunshine chair for the Society of Professional Journalists. He was co-director of the 1999 Georgia open government survey, and an unpaid consultant and trainer for the 2003 Alabama open government survey.