With this being Sunshine Week, now is a good time to contact elected officials and remind them of the need for open and transparent government. Public access to documents and meetings is essential for holding government accountable and ensuring that lawmakers are acting in the best interest of citizens.
That is the purpose behind Sunshine Week, which runs through Saturday and is named for the disinfecting properties of exposing government functions to the light of day. Notably, it is tied to the March 16 birthday of James Madison, a Founding Father who proposed the Bill of Rights. The observance was launched by the American Society of News Editors 14 years ago and continues to grow in importance as government officials increasingly try to avoid scrutiny.
While President Trump’s declarations that the media is “the enemy of the people” inevitably draw national attention, examples of opaqueness abound in our state. Some members of the Legislature continue to seek ways to evade the Public Records Act that calls for transparency at all levels of government. As we have written editorially in the past, state lawmakers should be subject to the same scrutiny that is given to officials at the city and county levels, and efforts to subvert the law poorly serve the public.
It is the public that is the ultimate stakeholder in questions about open government, and it is the public that must demand transparency. It is the public, after all, that hires government officials through elections, pays the bills and provides the salaries. Journalists, emboldened by the federal Freedom of Information Act, which was passed in 1966, often provide the means for necessary scrutiny, and that work is carried out for the benefit of the public.
In spite of that, there is evidence that public support for the Freedom of Information Act is waning. Tim Franklin, a senior associate dean at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, told USA Today, “We’re at the biggest crossroads for FOI probably since the federal FOI was enacted in the ’60s.” Mark Horvit of the journalism school at the University of Missouri, added, “Lawmakers and policymakers are pretty emboldened and taking a lot of things which have been traditionally public and making sure that’s no longer the case.”
Washington’s Public Records Act was passed with 72 percent of the vote in 1972. Although it has been amended numerous times since then, the original premise still rings true: “The people of this state do not yield their sovereignty to the agencies that serve them. The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know. The people insist on remaining informed so that they may maintain control over the instruments that they have created.”
Those are the reasons the public should have access to the emails and schedules of lawmakers. The reasons investigations of harassment claims in the Legislature should be made public. The reason lawmakers should err on the side of transparency when there is a question about whether particular records should be public. Those also are the reasons citizens should support local newspapers, which serve a unique watchdog role over government.
Most important, the public must demand accountability and transparency and must be willing to remind elected officials of that demand. Sunshine Week is a good reminder of that but, in truth, every week should be Sunshine Week for the people we hire to represent us.
