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.