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The Tallahassee Democrat
Sunshine Sunday's cartoon by Tallahassee Democrat
editorial
cartoonist Doug Marlette.
Storm clouds hover over Sunshine laws
Ignore your health, it's been said, and it will go away. The same is true of our freedoms.
Florida is one of the few states that explicitly assures citizens access to government meetings and public records. It's their constitutional right.
But while Florida is a national model, the always difficult struggle to maintain government in the "Sunshine" has gotten even tougher in the past two years. Amid legitimate concerns about security, terrorism and identity theft, efforts to grant new exemptions to Sunshine laws have risen sharply.
Some exemptions, carefully and narrowly crafted, make sense in these uncertain times — for example, schematics of municipal utility systems that would be sensitive to sabotage.
Others, however, cast too wide a net by not being specific enough. Still others seem designed to help special interests maintain a competitive advantage or protect a particular group from unwelcome outside scrutiny.
The good news is that Floridians in November underscored their support for open government. The constitutional amendment that 76.5 percent of voters approved requires each house of the Legislature to pass by a two-thirds majority any new exemptions.
That effectively smothered the notion that only the press and First Amendment activists cared deeply about open government.
Even so, Florida's Sunshine laws are threatened. More than 800 exemptions are already on the books, and state lawmakers since 2001 have been busily proposing new ones at roughly twice the rate as in each of the previous six years. Because of strong resistance, far fewer actually passed.
Last year, for example, 153 exemptions were offered; 10 became law. Almost 120 are already proposed this year.
Barbara Petersen, president of the First Amendment Foundation, said her organization agrees that many proposed exemptions have merit — in their intentions. But the devil's in the details, and lawmakers often fail to write legislation that stays within the stated purpose of public records and open government laws, she said.
Access is always a balancing act between the public's right to know and public safety. Few would argue that security sometimes trumps Sunshine. But ensuring that state and local governments in Florida remain as open as reasonably possible isn't solely the job of people like Ms. Petersen and media lawyers. It's yours, too.
Pick up the phone or send an e-mail message to your lawmakers. Tell them that this is truly the Sunshine State.