Where The Sun Don't Shine

While Florida may have among the most progressive public access laws in the country, the state still faces real challenges with respect to keeping basic public information open and accessible to its citizens. The Planet recently discovered just how limited that access can be.

Provided for in Florida's state constitution, the Sunshine laws insure that government records and meetings are open to the public unless specifically exempted by statute. Without those laws, there's little chance of government accountability, and that fact encompasses everything from nearby school district meetings, for example, to the more distant, but equally important decisions made at the state level, such as within the Department of Education.

So when the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors voices concern that yearly exemptions to the law are getting out of hand - exemptions now total about 800 - residents should take note. The more exemptions made to the law, the less everyday folks as well as journalists are able to understand and respond to how our government functions, and its impact upon our lives. But exemptions are not the sole source of concern. Problems also ensue when government bodies lack the resources needed to grant the public equal, efficient and affordable access.

In February, prompted by the revelations that conservative columnist Armstrong Williams was being paid by President Bush's administration to flack for No Child Left Behind, the Planet decided to find out how the state of Florida was spending its public relations dollars. We initiated a request at the state level to determine the PR expenses incurred by a handful of Florida departments for specific programs during the last five years. Included in the request were the Agency for Health Care Administration, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the Department of Education.

The responses, when they came, were surprising. Most significant was that none of the departments had immediate access or knowledge regarding the finer points of their department's expenditures on public relations. That was because many of the agencies - like FDLE and AHCA - had anywhere from seven to 30 different offices from which such public relations dollars could be spent.

At AHCA, we were warned that the request could take months and cost, on the low end, at least $5,000. At the Department of Education - where we specifically limited our request to public relations dollars spent only on the Florida A+ Plan and the FCAT - we were told by informational specialists that the department's small staff was in the throes of implementing the FCAT and No Child Left Behind, and honoring such an open records request would take months, cost thousands of dollars (no estimate was given) and would require staff to individually sort through old contracts and purchase orders.

Adria Gonzalez, director of the Tallahassee-based First Amendment Foundation, says there's a real problem when public records requests become untenable to the average citizen. Understaffed departments, bad record-keeping and costly information retrieval all violate the intent of the Sunshine laws.

"There has to be a governmental organizational structure where they are keeping track of the records," Gonzalez says. "You should have a public information officer who can comply with the law and retrieve the records. There has to be someone keeping track of it."

It's not just a problem at the state level. As Dan Christensen of the Daily Business Review in South Florida has noted, the Justice Department told an interest group seeking the details of immigrant detainees' legal proceedings following 9/11 that the search would cost the group an estimated $373,000. Meanwhile, the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors has maintained a weekly Internet posting, called Sunshine Sunday, to enhance citizen understanding of the importance of Sunshine laws.

Senator Skip Campbell of Coral Springs, a former Democratic minority whip, hopes to improve state agencies' compliance with Sunshine laws. Senate Bill 322 would require the state to report and keep an active record of all outsourcing contracts and subcontracts. As written, the bill would increase the accessibility of information at the Department of Management Services and its Center for Efficient Government. The center was created by Governor Bush last March to make the office more transparent, and to focus on the way high-dollar government contracts (more than $10 million) are awarded.

But the governor has proven to be less than enthusiastic about the senator's bill, according to Campbell. Still, he believes it will expand the scope of the center, while at the same time forcing the state to improve its compliance with the Sunshine laws.

He knows the extent of the problem first-hand, since his own open records request turned into a nightmare. Campbell wanted to know the outsourcing of contracts overseen by the state. His hunch was that, while the government didn't directly outsource to remote contractors, the companies hired by the contractors - i.e., the subcontractors - were from far-flung areas, and hardly local. In fact, Campbell finally found out - after months of waiting for open record requests to be fulfilled - that some of the state's informational systems subcontractors were based as far away as Ireland, India and Pakistan. His bill would require the Department of Management Services to report all outsourcing contracts and subcontracts with the state, including the contractor's name, location and cost of service.

"Should we have that info? You're darn right we should have it. If we don't have the information, I say shame on the agencies. That's not good business practices, but that's what they're doing."

allyson.gonzalez@weeklyplanet.com