Government has a duty to turn over records

By Brian Sonntag | • Published March 16, 2008

Today is the beginning of Sunshine Week, an annual event sponsored by the American Association of Newspaper Editors that is “about the public’s right to know what its government is doing, and why. Sunshine Week seeks to enlighten and empower people to play an active role in their government at all levels, and to give them access to information that makes their lives better and their communities stronger.”

At the state Auditor’s Office, we’ve been engaged in our own effort along these lines: a performance audit of how 30 state agencies and local governments respond to public records requests and what can be done to ensure a successful response for governments and citizens alike.

Some have questioned why we did this audit.

The answer is simple: Citizens asked us to.

In 2006 and 2007, we fanned out across the state using in-person and electronic town-hall meetings and telephone surveys to get a read on what citizens wanted from our performance audit program.

In all, we heard from 1,000 people with interests as varied as you might expect. One thing we didn’t expect, and what prompted this audit, was the frustration we heard over and over from citizens who feel they are not getting enough information on government. We don’t know yet why they feel this way; we plan to explore this further this year.

As a starting point, however, we thought we’d take a look at how agencies respond to requests and what it takes to provide good customer service in the public records arena.

I’m not going to go into all of the details of what we found or what we are recommending. That information will be in the audit report scheduled for release in April.

But I will share a few general observations:

• Tone at the top is the most important factor in successful responses to public records requests. Agency managers and public records officers who genuinely want to provide citizens the information they want, in a format they can understand, and in a time frame in which it is useful, create what the Attorney General’s Office Model Rules for public records calls “a culture of compliance.”