Open government: A fight that’s never over
THE NEWS TRIBUNE
Just in time for Sunshine Week, evidence of secrecy – and forced disclosure – at the Port of Tacoma.
Sunshine Week aims to emphasize the importance of open government. A national initiative, it’s a reminder that the battle for public access to public information is never won.
Some believe that only the media are interested in – or benefit from – efforts to pry open the inner workings of government agencies. Not true.
In the Port of Tacoma case, a citizens group, Friends of Rocky Prairie, had pushed for documents relating to a rail logistics center the ports of Tacoma and Olympia wanted to create in Thurston County.
Some of the documents the Tacoma port turned over are merely embarassing: Officials making less-than-polite remarks about the group or Olympia port officials. But among them was a February 2007 e-mail from a senior manager: “Erased the ‘MSW Transfer Facility’ text.”
That sounds disturbingly like an illegal expunging of a public document that would have been of considerable interest to citizens opposing the center. Friends of Rocky Prairie discovered only months later that an early design of the center had included a municipal solid waste transfer facility – a garbage handling site.
Many public officials and administrators are hard-wired to keep a lid on documents or discussions that might embarrass them or derail their projects. That’s why Washington has laws mandating open meetings and open records.
A News Tribune report Sunday found that many of Pierce County’s local governments seem to be complying with open records laws. Nearly all public requests for documents in 2007 appear to have been granted – though some agencies were so sloppy about logging these requests that their self-reporting can’t necessarily be trusted.
Pierce County’s Law Enforcement Support Agency, which handles emergency dispatch calls, is a good example of such sloppiness. It got 25,772 requests for police reports and other documents, but its accounting was so vague that there’s no way to judge LESA’s actual performance.
A bigger problem is unwarranted delay. The worst offender here appears to be the City of Puyallup, which was taking its own sweet time in 2007 to turn over public records. In one case, a citizen waited 69 days for a two-page police report; another had 166 days to get 28 pages of police records. This is simply inexcusable.
But nothing compares to deliberately destroying a document that is supposed to be available for public inspection. That’s the high crime of government secrecy. The media may howl the loudest about such outrages, but the public has every bit as much at stake. Ask the Friends of Rocky Prairie.
