Happy birthday, Dad

My dad would have been 96 today. He died a couple months shy of his 90th birthday. My dad and I were not close. I was several rungs down the ladder from his favorite child. That is not to say I took nothing positive away from the relationship. My dad taught me two productive lessons I have adopted as my own. They were useful in our farm life when I was a child and I draw on them still today. “After you go through a gate, close it.” “After you use a tool, put it back in its place.” I might not exhibit much discipline in many areas of my life – I have been known to eat out of the frozen yogurt carton on occasion and the floor of the car can make a good collector of empty coffee cups when I am driving. But I know where to find my hammer when I need it, because I put it in its place after I used it the last time. And if my horses get out, it’s because passing white-tail deer tramped through their pasture fence, not because I left a gate open.

Sunshine Week: Keep the sun shining on government

Government business is best conducted in the light of day, with all eyes open. Today launches Sunshine Week, a time set aside to spotlight how important open government and freedom of information are to not only those of us who cover the news, but to all who are affected by the business of government. Voters select the people they feel are best for the job, or at least those who best represent their positions on issues of the day. Then how the city, county, state and country are run is left in the hands of the elected. It is a system that is not without its faults but one that we believe remains the best in the world. But giving a vote to a candidate is not the same as giving over all power. You as individuals and we as the media have the right to monitor what elected officials do with the power to govern they’ve been handed, how they spend the public’s money, how they perform as stewards of the public trust. To exercise that right, the public must have access to information, records and the decision-making process used by city councilors, county commissioners, state legislators and all others in public power. Not only is transparency in government a necessity, it is the law. Oklahoma’s Open Meeting Law provides only a few listed exceptions to the mandate that the people’s business be conducted in public. The law extends not only to government bodies but to other boards and groups, like school boards and regents, that have been given the privilege of overseeing public business and spending public funds. Sometimes those who are the overseers of the public’s business forget, at least temporarily, their role. They decide that tax dollars being spent are theirs to dole out without recourse or oversight and that records belonging to the public are their own property rather than simply entrusted to their care. When those memory lapses hit, we in the media are obliged to step up and say let the sun shine on government. We are committed to keeping the veil pulled away from the face of the public’s business. When those in government don’t remember the law, or simply don’t follow the law – in ignorance, in defiance or for whatever reason – the people must remind them. If the media are lax in standing up for open meetings and open records, it will be no time at all before the people will be lax in demanding transparency as well. When no one watches, when no one complains, when no one takes up the cause of righting wrongs and holding tight the rights we own, then those rights are placed in jeopardy. When the people’s rights concerning how they are governed, how their tax dollars are spent, how public decisions are made, erode even the slightest then the next time it becomes easier to say no and more difficult to conduct business in the open. It can be something so slight as a birth date removed from a criminal charge that otherwise would have let your neighbors and business colleagues know the defendant is not you but someone else with the same name. It can be something so simple as a city commission vote on an item not on the meeting’s agenda. It can be something that seems so little. And yet it means so much. Open government and freedom of information are on our minds, as community journalists, 52 weeks a year. This week, we remind you how important they are to your lives year round, too. Let the sun shine. J.B. Blosser Bittner is Stillwater NewsPress editor.

Voter turnout not so super for Super Tuesday

Stillwater’s mayor election drew a whopping 4,863 voters, most of them showing up to elect Councilor John Bartley to become the city’s next mayor.
Bartley indeed won big, with more than 81 percent of votes cast. But Bartley’s 3,968 votes represent only a tiny sliver of the voter pie in Stillwater, Okla.
With 22,978 registered voters in Stillwater, that means Bartley was elected by less than 18 percent of registered voters. That’s a sad commentary on our population’s use of the rights we have. I suppose having the right to vote means also having the right to not vote.
I will be interested to hear someone explain that position to the Stillwater soldiers coming home from Afghanistan in the coming weeks. They just spent the past year away from family -- and fighting terrorism. Most of Stillwater just spent election day doing anything but voting.
Thank you to our military men and women who put my freedoms ahead of their own lives. I voted today. You didn’t tell me how to vote. You simply stepped up to defend our way of life so that I could.

Spring gardening can wait - until spring

Neighbors are raking and pulling and mowing and clearing a winter's worth of yard litter. Or is it simply the debris of a very long fall?
I am slow to join the swarm of early March gardeners. I picked up a few limbs, raked a handful of crumpled pecan shells and took a run at a 6-inch layer of sycamore tree leaves hobknobbing with the aftermath of a full grown oak. 
With temperatures more May than March we feel the pressure to pluck and prod and plant and prune. It will come. It will come.
But not today. 
Today is feet up, iced tea, favorite jeans, a nearby dog belly craving a scratch. I love Sunday afternoon.