Every week should be Sunshine Week

Spring is upon us and all late-season cold fronts aside, the sun is shining.

John Denver put it well in his old song:

“Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy

Sunshine in my eyes

Can make me cry

Sunshine on the water

Looks so lovely

Sunshine always makes me high.”

By AUSTIN LEWTER, Director, Texas Center for Community Journalism

Of course, The Temptations liken sunshine to love:

“I’ve got sunshine on a cloudy day

When it’s cold outside, I’ve got the month of May.”

Sunshine Week is an annual, nonpartisan, nationwide celebration held in March that highlights the importance of open government, transparency and public access to government records.

This year, it ran March 15-21.

Coordinated by the Brechner Freedom of Information Project, it brings together journalists, civic groups and citizens to discuss freedom of information— which is more important now than ever.

According to reporting from NPR and The Guardian, the world’s leading democracy watchdog, the V-Dem Institute, now classifies the U.S. as “no longer a liberal democracy,” warning of rapid democratic decline in recent years.

That’s democratic in the lower-case accountable-to the-citizen sense, not the capitalized political party sense.

It refers to the growing concentration of administrative power in the years since 9/11, weakened institutions, curtailed civil liberties and politicization of government.

The research compares the U.S. trajectory to countries like Hungary and Turkey—only faster in decline

It also warns such erosion is hard to reverse.

It starts with government transparency — sunshine. And sunshine starts at home, with your newspaper.

Keeping an eye on government usually comes down to one thing: the money.

Are tax dollars being spent where they ought to be — on roads you can drive, schools that work and public servants who earn their keep?

Who’s getting the contracts? What’s buried in that bond election fine print?

In Texas, we’ve got a couple of old but sturdy tools for that job. They are the Texas Public Information Act and the Texas Open Meetings Act.

They’ve been around more than 50 years, and they still do what they were built to do: shine light in places some folks would rather keep dim.

That’s the spirit behind Sunshine Week. It is a reminder that open government isn’t a luxury. It’s the whole point.

To the Legislature’s credit, there’s been some tightening of the screws. Public officials now face clearer consequences if they ignore records requests.

And if a budget’s on the table, folks get to see it ahead of time. That’s just common sense.

Still, anybody who has worked a courthouse beat or endured a long council meeting knows there’s always another workaround, another delay, another excuse.

The horror stories about lack of sunshine abound.

When agencies abuse open records requests just to stall, there ought to be consequences.

The attorney general is supposed to be the umpire — not a shield.

The law is clear. Public information is presumed open unless there’s a real, legally specified reason to keep it closed.

But too often, requests that should be filled in days get tied up for weeks or months.

And then there’s the price tag. Records requests can run into the thousands of dollars.

Worse yet, sometimes that money is collected up front while the government turns around and asks permission to withhold the very records it’s already been paid to produce.

That’s not transparency. That’s a toll booth.

At the end of the day, it still comes back to money. Public money. Taxpayer money. Your money.

How is being spent? How is it being tracked? How is it used to keep the public — especially nosy journalists — at arm’s length?

Open government only works when people insist on it. Not doing so is the first slide into a less liberal democracy.

So, for us, every week is Sunshine Week.

It shouldn’t be a once-a-year exercise in good intentions. It should be the baseline for how we cover government every single week.

If we’re not consistently pressing for records, asking harder questions and shining light into the routine corners of public business, then we’re not fully serving our readers.

Transparency isn’t a campaign.

It’s a commitment.

Make every week Sunshine Week, and the public will be better for it.