Sebring Highlands Today

Dave Bryant, editor

Protect Your Rights

There are two great cornerstones to Florida's Constitution. The first is its mirror of the foundational principles of the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. The second is Section 25 of the Florida Constitution, which provides for Government In The Sunshine.

Not every state in the Union has a government-in-the-sunshine law, so at first look it would appear to be something less than foundational. Yet if one examines the other rights recognized in the U.S. and Florida constitutions, it becomes clear they make little sense without Government In The Sunshine.

What is free speech if one is denied access to government records? What point is the right to peaceably assemble if those elected to serve may assemble, dispute and decide in secret assembly?

The very first section in the Florida Constitution is the recognition and bold statement that: "All political power is inherent in the people. The enunciation herein of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or impair others retained by the people."

The booming population in our state, the urban sprawl, the struggle to eke out a living for many all conspire against our republican democracy. For centuries democracy-minded people were unable to meet all together as a group of landowning electors, to debate first-hand those issue that would shape and govern their livings and their lives.

Now we go to the voting booth to turn over the reins, not merely of government, but of informed, intelligent debate. Too many of us - voting statistics suggest often more than half - put our apathy on autopilot. The rest of us are deeply reliant on the press, the media, to explain to us what is going on with the government that is exercising our power by proxy, but not always for us. How do we understand the complexities of our fast-paced, specialized world so that we are, in the full sense of the word, citizens? The press becomes our filter, our funnel, more than ever in such a world.

That places a tremendous onus on the Fourth Estate. They must do for us what we usually cannot - sit in on meetings, read and study reports, learn the lingo of specialized fields, discern and prioritize the issues and their sundry outcomes, and funnel it all over to us in an intelligible package that won't take too much of our time to digest and comprehend.

That means the rights we have but which we are too busy to exercise with any consistency, must adhere to the free press our forefathers recognized as a bastion of democracy. Those rights must attach too and be amplified in a free press.

That is why citizens and their public servants must perform surgery on a worm called Chapter 119 of Florida's statutes on the state level, and on the attitudes of government officers and agents at the county and municipal levels.

Chapter 119 begins well enough, echoing the state constitution on the public's right to know and possess its documents. These items are indispensable for holding government officers and agents accountable for their public service stewardship and for the proper exercise of one's own inherent political power.

Yet Chapter 119 has increasingly become the escape route for those who would flout the Florida constitutional imperative. Its 15 pages in the Florida statutes are near filled with one exemption after another. Every year lawmakers submit more bills to kill the right to know and the right to hold accountable, and thus, the right of the public to exercise its inherent political power. More bills are coning at this year's legislative session that would further cripple your right to know. They are submitted under every imaginable pretext but they boil down to someone's special interest.

That anti-constitutional spirit trickles its way down to county and municipal government officers and agents. Press requests are treated like a terrible burden, and many government agents will hide behind the "reasonable" time frame the statute affords them under the law to deliberately drag out their response to a request. This is particularly true for those who operate under a 9 to 5 mentality.

Some governments keep multiple files about the same employee or case or issue, hiding what its custodians deem sensitive information in the one file while keeping innocuous material in the second. When a journalist asks to see "the file," he or she gets the sanitized version, and the existence of the other file remains hidden.

This kind of danger could be aided and abetted by the advance of technology. Some governments are scanning files and records into an electronic file that can only be viewed on a computer. Are all the original and subsequent documents being scanned in, or are clerical personnel or their supervisors deciding what goes in and what does not? Computer files can be space savers, but citizens should always be able to look at any hard copy. Documents that get scanned take longer to put in a file than just slipping a few pages into a folder. That may serve to dissuade some agents from including it in a computerized version.

After hours press requests are often treated with abhorrence by government agents who, forgetting that they are public servants, whether elected, appointed or hired, feel they should not have to share the information they know, even though they have no special rights over any other citizen, and even though they will talk to their best friend about the matter.

Some of those examples violate the spirit of Government In The Sunshine. Some are just inconveniences. Some violate the letter of the law and are punishable by criminal and civil sanctions.

What we need are fewer exemptions to the Government In The Sunshine law than already exist. What we need is a spirit of appreciation for that law and our state Constitution, and a willing compliance to them. We need fewer bills, like the Dale Earnhardt autopsy photos flap, that ride an emotional crest that politicians can seize on to cash in on a few votes.

And what we need is more teeth in the law to exact greater punishment for those who would flout a bedrock of our Constitution. We know of law officers and lawyers who, professing either an ignorance of the law or the superiority of their department policies over the law, disobey the public records law by refusing to produce reports and documentation not exempted by Chapter 119. These are the very same people who have sworn to uphold the law, who arrest and prosecute offenders daily. They themselves break the law but think nothing of it because they do not take it seriously.

That leads to our last suggestion - that violations of the public records and public meeting laws be made into felonies.

Perhaps when government officers and agents realize they could go to prison for trampling on our constitutional rights, they will begin to understand how serious and vital those rights are.

The rights to free speech, to assemble, to press, to due process, etc., all have meaning within the context of the Right To Know.

Knowledge generates wisdom, and wisdom fuels power, the political power that inheres in every one of us and which is guaranteed in our Florida Constitution.

We must not give our birthrights away.