Editorial: Government works best in the open

It’s Sunshine Week – an annual time set aside to remind everyone that the best government is open government and that ultimately the People have a right to know what their elected officials are doing.

Unfortunately, we are living in a “partly cloudy” world today. Partisan court decisions have eaten away at some of the legal guarantees of transparency. Prominent elected officials and talking heads besmirch the reporters work to find out and report the truth. Meanwhile, an over-dependence on “news” via social media and a drop in local advertising have contributed to the closure of more than 1,800 – you read that right – more than one thousand eight hundred newspapers since 2004.

That figure comes from a study by the University of North Carolina, which said: “For residents in thousands of communities across the country… local newspapers have been the prime, if not sole, source of credible and comprehensive news and information that can affect the quality of their everyday lives. Yet, in the past decade and a half, nearly one in five newspapers has disappeared….”

Bringing the issue close to home, in recent years we’ve seen several small-town newspapers close and consolidate in the Texas Panhandle. Wellington and Memphis, along with Hollis, Okla., were all absorbed into the Childress paper and rebranded. The same thing happened with papers in Silverton, Matador, and Paducah.

And it’s not just a problem for the smallest of our rural communities. Hereford, with a population of almost 15,000, narrowly avoided losing its paper just last month. The 118-year-old Hereford Brand announced it was ceasing publication a week before a former employee swept in and saved the institution.

Communities that lose their newspapers do not just lose the weekly or daily recordings of the local football team and announcements of births and deaths. They lose a piece of their soul and, ultimately, they lose their history. Your newspaper, at its best, reflects the heart of the community – reporting on the things that are important to a town’s growth and development as well as covering the unpleasant news of crime and tragedy. Taken as a whole over time, those news articles and ads and notices capture the story of the community… preserved on the printed page for posterity.

It is the local newspaper that delves into bond issues and elections to inform voters so they can, hopefully, make intelligent decisions at the ballot box. It is the local newspaper that covers meetings to keep tabs on what’s going on with city councils, school boards, commissioner courts, and college regents. And, when necessary, it’s often newspapers that take advantage of public information laws to shine the light – the sunshine – where people don’t always want it.

Elected officials are always in favor of transparency… until they aren’t. The Clarendon College Board of Regents is good example of this. Particular regents for some time now have grilled the college administration in the name of “transparency,” while they themselves have violated the Texas Open Meetings Act.

The Enterprise is even now reviewing several college documents obtained through open records requests, but in the meantime one fact stands out. The college board in the last two years has twice had to have its attorney provide them extra training on Open Meetings issues – beyond what they’ve already legally been required to take. That indicates a problem – either with understanding or with compliance.

The City of Howardwick also has had its problems with Open Meetings violations over the last year. The sheriff shut down one meeting for lack of a quorum, and another meeting, called under an “emergency” provision without the normally required 72 hours’ notice, was halted after the Enterprise objected that the topic did not fit the definition of an emergency. The city council later paid an attorney to train its members.

One would hope that all public officials would agree that openness is a good thing, that the public has a right to know what’s going on, and that, above all, the law should be followed. The Open Meetings Act isn’t complicated; it’s actually pretty straight forward. And yet it requires a constant effort to educate people about what it says, why it’s important, and how it works in practice. Former Clarendon editor Bob Williams even once went so far as to publish the entire text of the act back in the 1990s to educate readers and public officials.

The Open Meetings Act and its companion, the Public Information Act, are statutory sunshine… exposing public officials and their actions to the light of day. And it is newspapers – like this one – that throw open the shutters so that light can shine through the window of government so that you, as a citizen and as a voter, can continue to have the best information possible.

Openness is the only way democracy works. Knowledge is power, and keeping government in the sunshine ensures that power stays with the People.