Records More Open

All Tennesseans scored a major legislative victory last month when the General Assembly finally voted to improve one of the country’s worst open records laws.

Starting July 1, the law will set a deadline for local and state bureaucrats to respond to freedom of information inquiries from the press and general public.

Until now, bureaucrats could bob and weave and avoid any accountability for hoarding public records, with little recourse available to the press and private citizens. Now, government agencies have seven business days to turn over what rightfully belongs to the public.

Tennessee now goes from being the 43rd or 44th worst state for open records – depending on one of two national reports – to being the 10th most open state in the union.

“During that whole time, there was no accountability in that law,” says Frank Gibson, a longtime Nashville-based political journalist and now executive director of the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government. “There might as well have been no law. Now we’ve put some teeth into the law. Maybe it’s baby teeth, but at least it’s teeth.”

Gibson deserves the thanks of every Tennessean who values good and honest government. Ironically, he also helped spearhead the last revision to Tennessee’s open records law – a quarter century ago.
The law then contained a provision for charging public officials with misdemeanors if they withheld public records, but sheriffs, police chiefs, prosecutors and tax assessors would not enforce the law. (As recently as 2004, 40 percent of Tennessee sheriffs surveyed incorrectly stated that arrest reports were not public records.)

Twenty-five years ago, Gibson helped pass into law fairly easy legal remedies for citizens who were denied open records. Still, Tennessee languished near the bottom (congratulations, Alabama and South Dakota) in meaningful open records acts nationwide.

The impetus for improving the state’s so-called “sunshine law” was the 2005 Tennessee Waltz federal sting in which a few state lawmakers were convicted of corruption.

Open-records advocates had argued for a four-day time limit for records custodians to turn over public documents. The Tennessee Municipal League argued for a five-day limit. The state’s larger counties, however, pushed for seven days.

That’s what passed last month the House’s State and Local Government Committee, chaired by Memphis Democrat Ulysses Jones Jr.

Jones’ greatest claim to fame is being the first paramedic on the scene at Graceland when Elvis died. In fact, Jones said during a telephone interview Tuesday that he “gave last rites” not only to Elvis, but to Elvis’ father, Vernon Presley, and to Elvis’ grandmother, all within a three- or four-year span.

Jones defends the new sunshine law as a fair compromise that accommodates the public while giving government officials time to respond.

The sunshine law requires all state, county and municipal records to be made available for inspection by any Tennessee resident – unless a record is specifically exempt. Current law includes hundreds of exemptions, including medical records, sensitive military documents and law enforcement investigative records.

“I’m not against open records,” Jones told the Herald Courier. “But some requests are nonsense. Some of the news media are abusing the system, too.”

The Memphis lawmaker points to a recent open records request for every city of Memphis e-mail that mentioned the words “ice cream.”

Frivolous requests about ice cream aside, the state of Tennessee should not have a meltdown over efforts to increase accountability, or freeze out inquisitors.

The new law is a start. It sets a time limit of seven business days in which agencies either have to grant the request, deny it or ask for a delay in writing and explain why.

Equally important, the beefed-up sunshine law formalizes the role of a new state agency watchdog. The Office of Open Records, a two-lawyer unit of the Tennessee Comptroller of the Treasury, has no enforcement authority but will act as an adviser for any Tennessee citizen who needs help navigating the open records law.

The state’s sunshine law has little provision for electronic records and “is still in the horse-and-buggy days,” Gibson says. “The work is not finished.”

We can’t afford to wait another 25 years to deal with technology and public records. The Tennessee legislature should act on that issue by next year.