Our report last Sunday, “REDACTED: Government records are the people’s records” provided a number of alarming examples of how Ohio lawmakers and courts in recent years have chipped away at Ohio public records laws.
Credit: Josh Sweigart
Credit: Josh Sweigart
From our investigation last year that found nearly 30% of government agencies across our nine-county region were out of compliance with Ohio public records and open meetings act laws, to proposed legislation to shield certain public service workers' timesheets from view, our state is trending more toward government opacity than transparency.
While news organizations rely on this information to keep tabs on our elected officials, public records laws aren’t meant to be used only by journalists — they are powerful tools available to all Ohioans.
But these tools aren’t worth much if they aren’t used.
As Ohio Auditor of State Keith Faber wrote in a contributed column last Sunday, “laws alone don’t guarantee honest government.”
It’s you, an engaged, inquisitive public, that make elected officials think twice about what they put in an email or how a police officer behaves while wearing a body camera.
Sunshine Laws are just “words on the page unless Ohioans make use of them,” Sean McCann of the ACLU of Ohio wrote in another contributed column.
Which is why efforts to make public records less accessible to the public are especially dangerous.
We wrote an editorial in January after Gov. DeWine signed into law H.B. 315, a massive 450-page omnibus bill with a number of troubling provisions, including changes to the Ohio Public Records Act, or Sec. 149.43 of the Revised Code, which would allow police departments and jails to charge a fee for access to video recordings.
These fees would put a significant strain on newsroom budgets, but would be even more burdensome for citizen journalists and other members of the public interested in seeing how their tax dollars are being spent.
At the end of the day, that’s why this all matters. We live in a representative democracy, a form of government where we choose to give up some of our own power to those we trust to make decisions for us, to spend our tax money in ways that align with the priorities we elect them to pursue.
If that trust is violated, however, our power as active participants in this democracy — and the democracy, itself — is diminished. It can be easy to take this power for granted.
“Our relative prosperity has tricked us into believing that our ability – our opportunity – to elect a school board, a county sheriff, or mayor doesn’t really matter,” wrote Stephen Starr, a journalist living in Dayton who has reported on governments in Turkey and Syria. “But it does. Democracy is not a right for anybody; it is something constantly in flux and under threat and must be earned and peacefully fought for.”
We hope the tools, information and resources offered during this Sunshine Week leave you feeling a little more empowered in this ongoing struggle for more transparent and accessible governance. Your participation in our democracy is more important than ever.
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