FOI's lawfulness long since upheld

3/16/07

It doesn’t matter how many years go by or how many judgments are passed down — freedom of information and access to government documents remain touchy issues. Newspapers and other media push to gain access to documents deemed by legal authorities to be open to public view, while cities and towns just as fiercely pull the other way. But the law spoke a long time ago, and it’s time for this struggle to end.
It’s no mystery why states and municipalities continue to fight the tide — aside from the implications for their own authority (knowledge is power and all that), it’s also a lot of extra work. It’s much easier to say a specific group of records is off-limits to the citizenry than it is to rifle through boxes of years-old permits and applications.
But there’s also a knee-jerk tendency among too many government officials toward secrecy. When in any doubt, towns are much more likely not to comply with a request, even in the face of evidence countering their position. Nothing displayed this tendency more clearly than the Connecticut Post’s recent attempt to acquire gun-permit applications from regional municipalities. Almost all recipients hemmed and hawed and obfuscated and, in the end, flat-out rejected the requests.
This is a violation of state statutes. The Freedom of Information Commission, whose rulings serve as the standard, has decided gun-permit applications are public records. This is important for informational purposes, but also for reasons of public safety. Citizens have a right to know who is applying to carry and conceal a weapon, and that right has been acknowledged by the state.
Local communities that did not abide by that decision — and among the six asked, only one complied — will now face more hearings, and rulings that will provide the same outcome. Information that does not violate rules of financial and medical privacy should be and will stay open to the public.
This is nothing new and nothing that should come as a surprise. But that these battles continue to be fought at this late date is not an encouraging sign. As an indicator that governments aren’t just concerned about individual rights, the Post’s attempt to view emergency response plans from various municipalities also ran into trouble. There’s no personal privacy at stake here, but all the same, the tendency is to conceal. For what practical purpose would a town want to keep an emergency plan secret from the people expected to use it?
In the end, public information is to everyone’s benefit. It is when decision-making takes place behind closed doors that people suffer — governments don’t grow corrupt because too many people are paying attention. The public benefits when court issues, public employee service records and political fundraising are open and honest. The more sunshine gets in, the more people are convinced that the government works as well for the average person as it does for the well-connected. At its heart, that is why Freedom of Information laws exist.