As access to public records erodes, more records are deliberately concealed from the public

Successful efforts to obtain public records are
down 18%. (Photo by Wesley Tingey, Unsplash)

While Florida's change in public records access may be more dramatic than some, it marks "a steady erosion of public records laws in a number of states," report Katherine Barrett and Richard Greene of Route Fifty. "North Carolina’s budget bill, for example, recently included language that changes previous open records laws to exempt current and former legislators from any requirements to share documents they create while in office and to give lawmakers the power to decide whether a record should be made public, archived, destroyed or sold."

"The ability of people to get records that are supposed to be made publicly available has been 'deteriorating terribly,' according to David Cuillier, director of the Brechner Freedom of Information Project at the University of Florida," Route Fifty reports. "In fact, a nonprofit organization called MuckRock, which consults with people and organizations in their efforts to get public records, has found that about 10 years ago such efforts were successful about half the time. Today, that’s down to about 18%." Megan Rhyne, executive director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government, told Route Fifty: "There has been a consistent move to conceal more and more records from the public. Some states have done so at a different rate than others, but we see this in many of them.”

The lack of access isn't limited to journalists "who have historically been able to serve as watchdogs over government by making Freedom of Information Act requests to get the documents necessary to fully report an article," Barrett and Greene write. “Though journalists often use FOIA, the majority of requesters are not reporters." Michael Morisy, co-founder and chief executive officer of MuckRock, told Route Fifty: “In many places, they are commercial requesters, like businesses that need information in order to make informed proposals for procurement. Then there are think tanks and universities."

Often referred to as "sunshine laws," most states have open records laws, but they can be weakened through exemptions. Barrett and Greene explain: "This has been the case in Florida, which long had a reputation as one of the most open states in the country. Its first sunshine laws were enacted in 1909, one of the first such pieces of legislation in the country. That law has been chipped away with increasing speed since the mid-1990s, and today it has about 1,200 exemptions and at least a dozen more are added almost every year. Of course, some of the exemptions, like access to individuals’ Social Security numbers, make good sense, but many are far more troublesome, like those protecting the governor’s past travel records."