Shady regard for sunshine

This from Tucson's Arizona Daily Star:

County officials who are responsible for maintaining area emergency-response plans in Arizona aren't willing to share that information with the public even though it's required by federal law. ...

As part of a national audit, journalists and volunteers across the country — including two from the Arizona Daily Star — descended on local emergency-management offices and asked for the Comprehensive Emergency Response Plans for their communities. Officials said "no" more than one-third of the time, and one in five provided only partial reports.

This has become a regular game in Arizona, as well as elsewhere. Every so often, as part of "Sunshine Week," journalists posing as regular members of the population-at-large go around to various local agencies, requesting public records that should, by law, be freely available. They are routinely turned away -- and sometimes interrogated or otherwise intimidated. The press reports the whole embarrassing mess and various government officials promise to change their ways. And then the whole thing happens in exactly the same way the next time around.

Nothing ever changes.

Arizona's Maricopa County apparently has a formal policy to actually discourage requests for records.

In Maricopa County, residents wanting to review hazardous material release and inventory reports would be required to present a driver's license for the office to copy and explain why they want the documents, county emergency officials said.

Warren Leek, director of the Maricopa County Department of Emergency Management, said that if people wanted access to information on facilities outside the vicinity of their home or workplace, or behaved in a manner that raised the staff's suspicions, the staff would not release the document immediately.

Arizona isn't even the worst offender. The article reveals that "[t]he highway patrol in one state even launched an 88-county alert seeking more information about one requester."

As frustrating as it is to see the same game played out year after year, the journalists who go about the thankless task of requesting records and being hounded in return by bureaucrats and cops deserve our thanks. It's eye-opening to see how little respect government officials have forthe public -- or for the laws they routinely disregard while insisting that the rest of us dot every "i" and cross every "t."