This week is Sunshine Week, an annual celebration of transparency laws, which means that government press offices across the country are hard at work pretending they don’t spend the other 51 weeks a year undermining those transparency laws.
If you want to see what your leaders really think of you and your statutory right to know what they’re up to, just ask them to comply with the open government laws on the books.
Two Florida Department of Law Enforcement officers claimed earlier this month that Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office blocked the release of DeSantis’ publicly-funded travel records and retaliated against them for arguing that the records were public under the state’s Sunshine Law.
As I wrote last year for Reason‘s special issue on Florida, politicians have been chipping away at the state’s vaunted public records law for decades, but DeSantis and his allies in the Florida Legislature are taking a sledgehammer to it.
Elsewhere in the Sunshine State, a fire chief called the police because a local reporter had the temerity to insist, correctly, that he had a legal right to inspect public records in person. Tampa Bay Times reporter Jason Garcia showed up at the headquarters of the Tampa Fire Rescue Department asking to see paperwork related to a firefighter’s termination. Florida’s Sunshine Law law is unambiguous on this point: “All state, county and municipal records are open for personal inspection and copying by any person.”
Nevertheless, two department employees, one of whom was the personnel chief, argued Garcia had no right to see the records since he’d already filed a records request online. Eventually, Tampa fire chief Barbara Tripp called the police to report Garcia for causing a disturbance, although he left by the time reinforcements arrived to end his reign of terror.
The personnel chief claimed in a memo that Garcia “persisted in being argumentative and repetitive and refused to accept the answer and leave.”
“No matter how you want to spin it, though, journalists are supposed to ask questions and seek explanations,” the Tampa Bay Times wrote in an editorial about the alleged hullabaloo. “That may rankle people in power, but it doesn’t constitute an unruly disturbance.”
Hellbound and Down 