Sunshine Week especially relevant

    Loftis

It’s Sunshine Week, and with apologies to Steve Brawner, I’m not talking about Daylight Savings Time.

The kind of sunshine that I’m discussing here is the kind that recently seems to be under almost constant attack — the public’s right to know what its government is doing.

Sunshine Week was initiated in 2005 by the American Society of Newspaper Editors and is celebrated annually by newspapers in Arkansas and across the nation, the Arkansas Press Association said in its weekly newsletter on Thursday, March 13.

Full disclosure: I sit proudly on the APA’s board of directors and support and appreciate its mission. I’m also very appreciative of the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act, which allows me — and any other Arkansas citizen — to view and copy public records and to attend public meetings of governing bodies.

FOIA is a handy tool for journalists, certainly, but it also gives every Arkansas citizen the right to information about how its government operates. Without it, we’d be vulnerable to the kind of government secrecy that an increasing number of our elected officials seem to covet.

Currently, our state legislature is considering a pair of competing bills that could have a profound impact on FOIA. I support one of those bills, SB 227, which would clarify the definition of a public meeting by instituting clear guidelines on what members of a governing body can discuss outside of a public meeting.

The other, SB 376, would define a public meeting as any gathering of more than two members of a governing body. That, of course, would allow two members to discuss public business in private. In theory — and very likely, quickly in practice — one of those two members could then have that same discussion with a third member and on and on. I can assure you, this already happens to some degree. With a watered-down FOIA, it would be the norm rather than the exception. And the citizens would have no idea of what was being said as public business was conducted in private.

I’ll be at the Capitol on Tuesday, March 18, prepared to testify at a committee hearing on SB 376.

What it represents isn’t transparency. It’s the opposite of open government, and its effect — if not its intent — is to keep the public in the dark. I won’t stand for it, and neither should you.

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Scott Loftis is editor and publisher of the Carroll County News. His email address is SLoftis@CarrollCoNews.com.