SPRING 2007 NEWSLETTER
GEORGIA FOI ACCESS
GEORGIA FIRST AMENDMENT FOUNDATION

OPINION

State should open government, not shield its business

Editorial published Feb. 11, 2007 in the Gainesville, Ga., Times

Despite what they say while on the campaign trail or after taking elective office, most politicians in Georgia aren't overly fond of the state's Open Records and Open Meetings laws.

Those laws, after all, allow the general public to go poking and prodding into the business conducted by their elected and appointed officials, and a lot of those drawing paychecks off taxpayers' accounts would just as soon none of the great unwashed paid any attention to how business is done.

As a result, the state's General Assembly on a regular basis likes to make an attempt at tinkering with the existing laws, usually under the pretense of making them more efficient, but most often with an ultimate goal of making it more troublesome for those who aren't part of the government enclave to gain access to public information.

And so it is with this year's effort at changing the state's Open Records law.

Legislation was introduced last week that would allow governments to require that any request for government record information be submitted in writing, thus empowering government employees at various levels to ignore verbal requests for public documents.

The legislation is being pushed by the Association County Commissioners of Georgia. The intent, according to supporters, is to make requests for records more precise, so that government employees don't have to worry about violating the law and being held criminally accountable for failing to satisfy an imprecise verbal request.

We do understand that those employed by the government can be held criminally liable if the courts find they have failed to satisfy a legitimate request for open records, though such prosecutions actually occur far less often than they probably should. And we agree that there are those from the public sector, especially overly aggressive "community activists" and the occasional political gadfly, who abuse the process by requesting hundreds of records as they engage in the chasing of wild geese.

But giving to government employees an immediate excuse for not providing to the public records that belong to the public isn't legislative action that needs to be taken. What at first blush may look like little more than a legislative speed bump could easily grow into a legal roadblock as written requests are then evaluated, scrutinized, reviewed and rejected depending on how documents are requested, whether appropriate forms are used, and whether every I is dotted and T is crossed.

We believe that the person on the street should be able to walk into a government office, ask for a copy of a specific document, and have it placed in his or her hands if it is readily available. Any legislative tinkering that complicates the process should be construed as the laying of a first brick in what eventually could become a solid wall of governmental privacy.

If, as seems the case, lawmakers are determined to revise the current law,they would be better served by expanding the scope of public access rather than restricting it. If lawmakers must introduce changes, we would suggest eliminating the three days governments now have to decide if they intend to comply with an Open Records request, and shortening the response period to 24 hours.

That's a change we would gladly support.

Reprinted with permission from the Gainesville Times.