The Place Where Ludington Talks
Government Transparency: Open to Interpretation
A president elected in part on his pledge to be the most transparent administration ever, still seems to honestly believe that fact as their friends in the White House Press Corps begins consigning the Obama Administration as the most secretive administration since the Nixon one.
Former New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson described the Obama White House as "the most secretive White House that I have ever been involved in covering," specifically noting her time covering Reagan and George W. Bush.
The Times national security reporter James Risen said earlier this year that the current administration was "the greatest enemy of press freedom that we have encountered in at least a generation," and suggested that the administration threatens reporters who do not pursue acceptable stories.
But perhaps most telling is the anecdote told where deputy press secretary Josh Earnest flagged an article by a Washington Post correspondent. It contained a comment juxtaposing a speech Obama had given two days earlier lauding freedom of the press with the administration’s decision to limit access to presidential photo ops on the trip.
Earnest, who succeeded Carney as press secretary in May, considered the reporter’s comparison unfair and asked him to take it out. After an argument, the reporter acquiesced.
Ironically, the Obama administration doesn't like being portrayed as unfriendly to the press, so its press office decides to stop a journalist from suggesting in a report that it is. How Orwellian.
But the quest for transparency in government must be waged by the people and by true journalists, because the government is finding that they just don't like it at any level. Locally, I've encountered resistance to requests for information from the City of Ludington, the Mason County Sheriff's Office, the Mason County Prosecutor's Office, and Hamlin Township. The City of Belding and the Michigan State Police have also posed their roadblocks and violated FOIA law flagrantly in doing so.
But a Michigan House Bill we've been following in its quest to become law showed some initial promise when it first made the scene. By the time it roundly passed the house, it was a bit neutered in reformative ability and scope due to the power of the local government lobbies like the Michigan Municipal League.
Less than 24 hours ago, The Detroit Free Press ran an op-ed article that anguished over the fact that a bill that was passed with over 90% of the vote in the State House of Representatives now languished in the State Senate, likely to be overlooked until a new session kicks in next year:
Republican state legislators are forever lamenting that government should be conducted more like a business. But who would want to own a business whose employees considered it none of management's business how or whether they were doing their jobs?
That's the dysfunctional relationship that prevails between many local government officials and the citizens they ostensibly work for.
On paper, Michigan's Freedom of Information Act guarantees any citizen's right to request records documenting their local government's activities and obtain copies at a reasonable cost. But in practice, many municipalities make a mockery of public records law by charging exorbitant fees or blithely ignoring statutory deadlines for responding to FOIA requests.
Lisa McGraw, director of public affairs for the Michigan Press Association, says that arbitrary fees and ignored deadlines were the two abuses most frequently cited in a statewide survey of journalists her organization conducted.
Last March, the state House responded to this chronic flouting of state law by enacting House Bill 4001, which establishes a uniform fee schedule for the production of public records and imposes financial penalties on local governments who failed to respond to legitimate FOIA requests within the five business days prescribed by law.
Under HB 4001, no public body could charge citizens more than 10 cents a page to copy public records available under FOIA.
The bill also reduces the fee charged for producing public records by 20% for each day after the statutory deadline that the record or copy is not made available.
Some lobbying organizations that represent local elected officials protested, but House members adopted the bill by a lopsided 102-8 vote, recognizing that municipal officials are accountable to voters, not the other way around.
That was way back in mid-March. In the six months since, the bill has been bottled up in the Senate Government Operations Committee, whose chairman, Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville, R-Monroe, has declined to bring it up for a vote.
Now, with just three working days remaining before state senators quit Lansing to attend to the more urgent business of campaigning for re-election, Richardville seems determined to let HB 4001 languish until the Senate's unpredictable lame-duck session, when it is likely to be pushed aside in favor of less public-spirited partisan priorities.
After the repeated requests about the bill's prognosis, Richardville's spokeswoman Amber McCann texted the Free Press that the majority leader is "talking with sponsor about scheduling a committee hearing" but has "no specific time line" for moving the bill.
Looks like citizens who want to discover what their government is up to will have to wait for a new Senate majority leader who is more interested in enforcing their right to.
http://www.freep.com/story/opinion/editorials/2014/09/24/michigan-f...
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