Editor’s note: This op-ed is by Bethany Dunbar, the editor of the Barton Chronicle.
Vermont law says people who work for the government, including our towns, school districts, and state agencies, must provide the public with records that are legally public documents. Often they do.
But if they don’t, there is no enforcement of the right-to-know laws. A small change in the law would help bring back accountability.
We need to change “may” to “shall” where the law discusses judges ordering plaintiffs to be reimbursed for lawsuits to force the government to release public documents. Now it says the judge “may” reimburse — that language should be changed to “shall.”
Such records include town budgets, court records, police records, records of town spending, records of minutes and decisions by zoning boards, how many state employees are in each department and how much they are paid.
We the people are paying the bills; we all have a right to know about spending and government decisions. The reason documents are public is so that the public can keep an eye on its government, and there are many times and all kinds of reasons government would prefer we did not.
If the press and public must act as law enforcement, the least the government can do is pay us back our expenses.”
More and more, when Vermonters and Vermont newspapers ask for information, they get stonewalled. There is a culture or a climate of “when in doubt, don’t give it out.” With more than 200 exceptions to the open document laws, it’s not surprising there is some honest confusion about what documents are supposed to be released.
It’s much easier to turn the public down since there is no enforcement. The only way the law gets enforced is if a newspaper or a member of the public is willing to hire a lawyer and file a lawsuit to get the information.
No one in the news business craves the chance to file lawsuits. When you consider the cost — which can climb into the tens of thousands of dollars — it is out of the range of most newspapers and most citizens.
Police records are most difficult to obtain. One of the exceptions to the open document laws is for police investigations that are under way, but police are required to release information surrounding arrests.
The trouble is the police have a much different idea of what the word “arrest” means than the public does. In a recent court case, Anne Galloway’s news website VTDigger.org and the American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont sued to find out the circumstances of a case in Wilder in May. Police said Wayne Burwell, who was erroneously handcuffed and pepper sprayed in his own home, was not under arrest. The judge recently accepted this excuse. ACLU and VTDigger.org have not said if they will appeal to the Vermont Supreme Court.
This particular problem in Vermont law could be solved by adopting the federal standard for releasing police information, which has turned out to be good enough for 35 other states. For more information on this, take a look at the American Civil Liberties Union website..
In the few times a newspaper has sued and won the opportunity to look at documents that should have been released to the public in the first place, most often judges have decided the newspaper does not need to be paid back for its expenses.
If the press and public must act as law enforcement, the least the government can do is pay us back our expenses.
It’s not that we in the press don’t want to do our job — it’s that we are handcuffed by this lack of enforcement and the current climate of keeping public documents away from the public. You might say we have been handcuffed and pepper sprayed, but the state says we are not under arrest.
Changing “may” to “shall” would completely change the tone of government accountability in this state. With luck it will mean lawsuits are not needed as often because government officials will change their tune to “When in doubt, give it out.”
It’s up to the government to train people who handle those documents to know which ones are public and which are not.
Vermont’s open government laws are among the worst in the nation. In a 2008 study, Vermont was ranked 49th.
This change would be a first step in a much better direction — toward the sunshine.
Our new secretary of state, Jim Condos, has fully supported changing “may” to “shall” in his campaign and since his election, and we appreciate his full support. Gov. Peter Shumlin is behind the change, but his attorney, Beth Robinson, has suggested language that will water down “shall.”
At the annual meeting of the Vermont Press Association recently, Ms. Robinson expressed concerns that the wrong people could bog down state government with requests for information. Apparently someone has asked for a list of everyone who works for the state and how much they are paid. This request would take workers days of work to answer.
That might be so, but once a full report has been set up, the state won’t have to do that work again. Towns put this information in town reports each year, the state of Vermont should have a similar report easily available to all.
We hope the Legislature sticks with the simple one-word change. Having said that, a qualified or amended “shall” is better than making no change at all.
We hope this change happens and that it is just the beginning of making Vermont’s government truly open and transparent.
