WINTER 2006-07 NEWSLETTER
GEORGIA FOI ACCESS
GEORGIA FIRST AMENDMENT FOUNDATION

The year 2006 was best yet for the Georgia attorney general’s open government mediation program: Thurbert Baker expanded open government in court, Stefan Ritter published important new research on it, and Baker was re-elected.

Better take note, Georgia deniers of public records and abusers of executive session!

By Tom Bennett

Decatur, GA., Nov. 27, 2006 – The ninth year of Attorney General Thurbert Baker’s Georgia Open Government Mediation Program was filled with milestones making it the best to date.  Baker inaugurated this special level of involvement in open government by his department in 1998. Since then, he and his assistants have entered hundreds of disputes. They have settled a host of them merely with strong letters. These went to public officials whose eyes suddenly were opened.

From the mountains to the Okeefenokee, elected officials were attuned to a new reality, one long overdue. Here it is: the U.S. Constitution has freedom of speech, and the state of Georgia sunshine laws. The years for these legal break-throughs? 1787 and 1831, respectively.

""Government operates best when it operates openly," writes the top legal officer in the state of Georgia. This is on the fourth click of Thurbert Baker’s home page.  Three events at 40 Capitol Square in Atlanta make the year now coming to a close an especially notable one for open government, as Baker and others are slowly leading Georgia, little by little, to achieve it. Big ’06 developments at the Law Department for this niche of government were:

   •  Baker was re-elected for his third four-year term as Georgia attorney general, ensuring that his emphasis on open government can continue; in the election Nov. 7, Democrat Baker defeated Republican Perry McGuire, 1,185,366 votes to 888,288, or 42.8 percent;

   •  The A.G.’s office sued for the first time in an open-government dispute, and won in Central Atlanta Progress v. Baker. In this important action, the Georgia Supreme Court established that when an agency "reviews" something, it has "received" it.  When Central Atlanta Progress Inc. got some plans for a NASCAR attraction and also for the 2009 Super Bowl game, they had received. These plans became this tax-supported group’s records. They are open the same as the tens of thousands of others from Rabun Gap to Tybee Light to which the Georgia Open Records Act applies.Atlanta never got the stock-car museum or the ’09 professional football title game; these were awarded to other cities. Meanwhile, what Georgians got, thanks to Baker, was more open government; and

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"In 1997, the Attorney General pressed for legislation to amend Georgia's Open Meetings and Open Records acts to give the Department of Law the ability to help citizens and government agencies resolve their disputes without resorting to litigation. After the legislation was passed, our office moved to create an informal mediation program to help Georgia’s citizens with questions or concerns about local government’s decisions to close meetings to the public or governmental responses to Open Records requests.

"Upon receiving a complaint from a Georgia citizen, attorneys at the Department of Law work to ensure that local governments provide all the access to meetings and records that Georgia citizens are entitled to under the law.  "If local governments fail to fulfill their obligations under the Open Meetings and Open Records acts, our office can initiate legal action to force the local government to obey Georgia’s sunshine laws."