By Jeanni Atkins guest columnist
The Meridian Star
MERIDIAN —
It cannot be doubted that the natural tendency of government power, "at every level‚" is to proliferate and protect itself and to increase at whatever pace, and to whatever extent, the public will abide. Nor can it be doubted that the best protection against such governmental excess, and the best assurance of fair, honest, accountable public officials is the right of the public to be informed as to the acts and actions of those public officials when they discuss, perform and carry out the business of the public.
— Justice Jess Dickinson, Mississippi Supreme Court
Citizens who desire to become informed about the issues their local government officials are discussing that will affect their community too often are kept in the dark.
There are many subtle, as well as not so subtle, ways of keeping the workings of government secret.
Open meetings problems
A meeting is convened, and the board zips through an agenda voting on issues that are not discussed.
How does this inform the public about local policy issues when you aren't privy to the discussions and debate?
You go to a meeting of your board of aldermen, and they huddle together and talk in such low tones you can't hear what they're saying.
So you're left to wonder about the pros and cons of the action taken and the reasons each voted as they did.
Common sense tells you that there had to be discussions beforehand for each member to know what they would be voting on.
But you can only speculate how they reached their decision and what they based that decision on since there is no deliberation in a public meeting.
Maybe there were exchanges of views by e-mail or on the telephone, over coffer or a meal.
Another frustrating difficulty, which has surfaced in New Albany, is the failure of the Board of Aldermen to make minutes of meetings available to the public within 30 days.
Members of the Concerned Citizens of New Albany citizens group say they have been told the minutes of meetings of aldermen in 2009 are still not available months later.
The Open Meetings Act says minutes of meetings become a public record after 30 days. So what's the excuse?
When requesting minutes, citizens are simply told that the person responsible hasn't prepared them yet.
So without access to the minutes and no deliberation in a public meeting, citizens essentially are kept ignorant about what their local officials are doing.
These actions run counter to the spirit of open government embodied in the Open Meetings Act. The law clearly sets forth this principle:
"that public business be performed in an open and public manner, and that citizens be advised of and be aware of the performance of public officials and the deliberations and decisions that go into the making of public policy."
The Open Meetings Act also states:
"the formation and determination of public policy is public business and shall be conducted at open meetings except as otherwise provided herein."
So the goal of an informed citizenry is not being achieved when the kind of actions described are occurring.
And what is the penalty for noncompliance with the Open Meetings Act? There is a fine of $100.
A bill introduced into the Legislature to raise the fine to $500 for the first offense and $1,000 for subsequent offenses and to make the individual violator responsible for the fine appears to be dead.
So it we're stuck with the status quo for another year.
Model Public Records Rules
If you're encountering problems with finding out what your local government officials are up to, you might want to consider writing a letter of complaint to Tom Hood, the director of the Mississippi Ethics Commission, which now serves as an ombudsman for citizens confronting difficulties with the Open Meetings Act and Public Records Act.
The Web site is: http://www.ethics.state.ms.us/ethics/ethics.nsf
You file a letter of complaint with Tom Hood, executive director of the Mississippi Ethics Commission. Then the Commission considers the merits of the complaint and issues an advisory opinion. Opinions that have been issued to date can be found on the Web site.
Obtaining public records can be a frustrating test of patience and deep pockets to bear the expense if records are released.
Model Public Records Rules, adopted by the Ethics Commission March 5, are designed to improve agency processing of records requests as well as to achieve several other goals:
• to emphasize the duty of agencies to respond in a timely manner to requests for records;
• to encourage a culture of compliance and cooperation by establishing best practices standards of responding to public records requests;
• to provide guidelines for what should be done to follow the basic principle of, "fullest assistance‚" in processing records requests;
• to suggest approaches to processing public records requests;
• to emphasize that basic training on public records compliance and retention is essential;
• to emphasize that doubts about whether a record should be released should be resolved in favor of disclosure.
If public bodies will adopt and follow these guidelines, the process of obtaining public records will be much improved
Responding to public records requests
The costs of records can pose a problem since public bodies set a wide range of charges. The Ethics Commission suggests fifteen cents as a reasonable per-page charge.
Tennessee, for example, sets this charge and requires agencies not to charge for the first hour of labor to compile a records request.
Some states seeking to define a, "reasonable‚" charge, however, have opted for ten cents per page.
Indiana uses this standard and also doesn't permit adding search costs, labor or overhead as part of, "direct costs."
Pennsylvania requires fees to be based on, "comparable duplication services provided by local business entities."
A recent request by the Clarion-Ledger for banking department records resulted in a charge of $35 for about 14 pages.
The reason given for this charge was the use of a $350,000 machine, raising the question of why a person who requests a public record is being asked to subsidize software and hardwire a public body uses already paid for with tax dollars. Is this really, "actual cost"?
Search fees also can also be added on to charges.
A bill in the Legislature sets the charge for search fees at the rate of the lowest paid employee capable of filling the request.
The problem of long delays in responding to records has been addressed in the model rules and a bill pending in the Legislature
The Model Public Records Rules advise public bodies to communicate with requesters and respond within five days to acknowledge receipt of the request, produce the records or give the requester an estimate of the time needed to fill the request or deny it.
A bill being considered by the Legislature would reduce the time permitted to respond to a request for a record from 14 to 7 days.
These problems of costs and timely response to requests for public records need to be seriously considered and resolved in favor of open government.
Jeanni Atkins is executive director of the Mississippi Center for Freedom of Information and University of Mississippi School of Journalism and New Media
associate professor. The MCFOI website is www.mcfoi.org
