ALBARADO: Government transparency essential

taxpayer-funded University of Arkansas and the nonprofit Razorback Foundation, which claims that the FOIA doesn’t apply to it.

• An Arkansan’s failed efforts to get emails and other documents regarding his interactions with a state trooper that led to the man’s arrest and loss of his permit to carry a concealed weapon.

• The Mansfield mayor’s accusation that members of the city council violated the open-meetings part of the FOIA by plotting via text messages to strip him of his authority.

• The identities of the people behind the companies that want to grow medical marijuana and the problems some licensing officials had meeting their own deadline for reviewing the applications.

• Faulkner County’s dysfunctional Office of Emergency Management.

Articles using the federal FOIA allowed people to learn that an Environmental Protection Agency Superfund Task Force kept no records of its deliberations and that a former CEO of a payday lending firm is seeking the top job at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency that once sought to severely limit payday lenders.

Some of these issues might seem arcane or of little consequence to you, but the FOIA also guards your right to know what your police department is doing, where crime occurs most frequently and whether your fire department is properly funded. The law also lets you find out about property values in your neighborhood and whether your school board is performing its job.

In other words, freedom of information laws protect your right to know what your government — the people you elected and the people they appoint and hire — is doing in your name and to you and for you.

Unfortunately, the Arkansas FOIA came under direct attack in 2017. By the end of the year’s legislative session, universities gained the power to keep secret the size of their police forces, the names and salaries of officers and other matters related to security. Legislators pretty much allowed public schools to hide all information about security.

One legislator said there are some things that should be kept secret because of the dangerous times we live in, because “bad actors” will seek advantage to do harm.

It’s unfortunate that fear is closing the door to the sunshine that the FOIA provides.

But it’s not all gloomy. As legislators last year put the brakes on some truly awful bills that would have gutted the FOIA even more, they created a task force to study our half-century old law to determine where it might need to be updated to reflect the rapid-fire, ubiquitous information age we live in.

There’s hope that this task force, composed of legislators, lawyers, journalists and transparency advocates, will come up with good suggestions for improving the law rather than further hobbling it.