Sunday, January 07, 2007
Secrets survive in the New River Valley
Christian Trejbal
Recent columns
- The wrath of Blacksburg
- Gmail isn't suitable for public records
- Candidates and their parties
- The aquatic center might sink
From the RoundTable blog
In the glowing remembrances of President Gerald Ford over the past couple of weeks, the nation seems to have forgotten one of his most disappointing moments. No, not his inexcusable pre-emption of justice by pardoning Richard Nixon. I'm thinking of his veto of a bill to beef up the Freedom of Information Act.
In 1974, Congress passed a bill to improve federal transparency in the aftermath of Nixon's secrecy. Ford vetoed it.
Congress overrode, and Americans have had more powerful tools to monitor their government as a result.
States, including Virginia, followed the federal government, opening their own records and meetings to public scrutiny.
Open government laws are only as good as the officials who oversee them, though, and many local governments still erect barriers to access.
The New River Valley is no exception.
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Last fall, The Associated Press and the state's newspapers tested whether average citizens could acquire public records to which they are entitled. Undercover reporters went to local governments and requested official e-mail between town and city councils or boards of supervisors, police or sheriff weekend incident logs, and school fire inspection reports.
Statewide, communities failed miserably, providing the records only about half of the time. Locally, things were only slightly better.
Radford stood out, providing all three records. Pulaski and Floyd counties came up with two. And Giles and Montgomery counties, only one. That's a 60 percent regional success rate.
It is tough to draw sweeping local conclusions from such a small sample. Maybe Montgomery County is completely open with its records and investigators just hit them on the wrong day. Maybe not. The results jibe with experience, anyway.
Montgomery County schools, for example, have hardly been a glowing beacon of openness under the current administration. Christiansburg Town Council does not go out of its way to alert the public about its meeting agendas and provide relevant documents online. And Floyd and Pulaski counties do not even put agendas online ahead of supervisors' meetings.
All local governments might want to check out what Blacksburg has been doing. Citizens can monitor council activities with timely, well-documented agendas. The town also provides live, online video streams of council meetings that are archived on the Web site. It's government geek bliss.
For further insight, I checked with Wat Hopkins, a professor at Virginia Tech who teaches about the Freedom of Information Act in his media law and reporting classes.
He has firsthand experience dealing with the law as an 11-year veteran of the Montgomery County School Board and as the new president of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government, the commonwealth's chief open government advocacy and education group.
The study "is discouraging, but it's not surprising," he said over coffee in Blacksburg.
He explained that those who follow the issue closely know there are plenty of problems despite relatively strong open government laws compared with many other states.
"Primarily, this is an issue of ignorance, not obstructionism," he elaborated. Officials think they are doing the right thing. When in doubt, given the choice of facing a boss irate about the release of documents or a few stories in the newspaper on a holiday weekend criticizing the lack of disclosure, they'll take the media exposure.
Such thinking subverts the laudatory goals of Virginia's open government laws. Reluctant officials hedge on the side of secrecy or see records requests as a burden.
"Access to records isn't something extra; it's part of the job," Hopkins said.
Nor is the state's FOIA law just a tool of the media. Average citizens use it all the time without even realizing it. Ask the police for a copy of an accident report to give to your insurance company; you just made a FOIA request.
Indeed, the state Freedom of Information Advisory Council fields requests for assistance all the time, and citizens ask for the most help.
Official laziness about public accessibility permeates too many local governments. Radford deserves praise for hitting the freedom of information trifecta last year and Blacksburg for its digital efforts. The rest of the New River Valley has some catching up to do.
Trejbal is an editorial writer for The Roanoke Times based in the New River Valley bureau in Christiansburg.
