More sunshine, not less
More than four decades ago, the New York Legislature passed the state’s Freedom of Information Law, declaring, “The people’s right to know the process of governmental decision-making and to review the documents and statistics leading to determinations is basic to our society.” Yet all these years later, a lot of public officials still don’t get it.
The latest demonstration of the unfortunate bureaucratic impulse to favor opacity over transparency comes at the state Department of Environmental Conservation, which decided last month to stop posting online consent orders for Region 4, which covers the Capital Region. The orders detail settlements and potential fines between DEC and companies or people who have violated state environmental laws. If you want to know how effectively New York is protecting the environment, this is essential information.
This sudden removal of public information from the web was disturbing enough, but DEC added to the problem with its conflicting explanations. When it took the information down, the agency said it was only trying to be consistent. Region 4, it said, was the only one of DEC’S nine regions to put consent orders online.
That’s a lame explanation. If consistency were truly the goal, wouldn’t the better course be for the other eight regions to follow Region 4’s lead and make it easier for citizens all over the state to see this public information?
Perhaps DEC officials realized how out of sync the move was with Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s call in the budget he proposed in January for a law requiring state agencies (as well as the Legislature) to post more government records online. Whatever the reason, the agency has put the consent orders back online with a whole new explanation: Region 4’s practice is “part of a pilot exploring DEC’S ongoing efforts to make web content publicly accessible.” All well and good, though how DEC went from concealing records in the name of consistency to remembering it had a pilot program to put them online in the first place is a puzzle.
The sooner DEC turns this pilot into policy, the better. But that shouldn’t be the end of it. All state agencies — and local governments, too — should put public records online as a matter of routine.
Technology has come a long way since New York passed its first Freedom of Information Law in 1974, when pretty much the only ways to view public records were to visit a government office in person or make a request by U.S. mail and wait weeks for an answer. Today, public information should be accessible to citizens wherever they are and whenever they want to see it, without a government official having the opportunity to hold up the request or make anybody jump through hoops, as many do.
That shouldn’t be a pilot program. It should be the law. We are way past the time that state and local officials should have gotten the message that public information belongs to the public, not to them.