“We the people” is the opening phrase of the U.S. Constitution that set the tone for how our nation and national government saw itself. It signifies that all Americans, from president to members of Congress to small-town mayors and average citizens, have equal access to our government.
That also means that citizens, regardless of status or station, should be able to see what any government agency is doing.
Sunday, March 10, to Saturday, March 16, is Sunshine Week, when news agencies around the country celebrate wins that have made government more transparent and to also warn readers and viewers about government attempts to hide public information.
It is the right of every American citizen to know what our elected and appointed officials are doing. They work for salaries paid by our taxes in offices also paid for by tax dollars.
By design, we should know how they are spending our tax dollars, whether it’s educating our children, fighting crime or fires in equipment we paid for, setting up statewide or nationwide programs or policies for our progeny or going to war on foreign soil on our behalf.
Records of how tax money was spent and the deliberations leading up to those decisions should and must be accessible by the public.
Excluding national security matters, it should be a given that every document produced by or stored by local, state and the federal government should be accessible at any time by members of the public, yet there are slews of state and federal laws to protect the public’s right to know.
Elected officials work for taxpayers and voters, so their email and phone records should also be available to the public. Yet in 2018, Arizona Rep. Bob Thorpe [R-District 6], who represents Sedona, tried to pass legislation that would make text messages and phone calls sent from a legislator’s private cell phone exempt from the state’s public records law. This came weeks after an Arizona Court of Appeals panel ruled that elected and appointed public officials cannot hide texts, emails and social media messages from the public by using their own cell phones.
Such a move was a naked attempt to deprive you, the public citizen, from seeing what elected officials are up to and what deals they may be making outside of official channels, actions which are antithetical to the nature of a free democracy.
Fortunately, the rest of the Legislature denied the exemption and killed the bill.
But such wins for transparency can only come if the public makes it clear that transparency is a fundamental facet of government and voters will not stand for any politician or official who tries to obfuscate and thereby deceive the public.
Everything government does should be known by the public at large and easily accessible with a phone call, an email, a click on a website or visit to a government office. Citizens must make it clear to officials that this is how American governments have been and should always operate, without exception.
Over the years, journalists at Larson Newspapers have had to file Freedom of Information Act requests of federal and state agencies or Arizona open records laws requests for local governments to obtain documents to inform our readers.
More often than not, local agencies freely provide journalists and the public with records we request because it’s easy to be forthright with the media and the public. Perhaps in part, it’s because filing a formal open records law request will only delay the inevitable and, in the interim, embarrass the official and department who tried to deny the request; when American citizens don’t get the public records we are entitled to, we are rarely quiet about it.
That being said, no government officials should seek to hide information from the public. They should demand transparency more strongly than we do because it affects their job directly.
Remember that government records are your records — officials are merely the caretakers of what you already own. We are the government and the government is us.
— Christopher Fox Graham
Managing Editor
