Not sure if the sun shines brighter in
Newcastle than in other parts of the state - but that town’s newspaper
publisher Bob Bonnar is all about bringing public activities and expenditures
into the light of day.
As
a journalist in Wyoming for almost half a century, I can attest that reporters
have been battling some public officials nonstop to make their meetings, their
activities and their expenditures public. It has been a long, grueling battle
but there is now some hope.
Bonnar
heaps credit on a joint legislative committee that recently passed a bill 8-4,
which offers sweeping new ideas for shining public light on public activities.
Sen. Cale Case (R-Lander) was chair.
Usually
the fights over exposing public activities concern money. My first serious fight was with the local
school district over releasing test scores way back in 1981.
Here
in Lander, we thought we had the best school in the state with highly paid
teachers and outstanding facilities. The
high school was famous for its open campus and its 18-credit minimum for
graduation. Kids were enjoying it and
everybody else was too.
My
kid brother, Ron Sniffin, who now lives in Cheyenne and is executive director
of the Wyoming Education Association, took advantage of it.
At
age 16, he graduated early from the Lander high school and we promptly hired
him as Ad Director to sell advertising for the Greybull Standard. Pretty amazing story – ask him about it some
time. But I digress.
Then we tried to find out our school’s
cumulative test scores were in the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, a national
academic test comparing our schools with other schools in the country.
I
had been looking over our daughters’ test scores at home one night and it made
me wonder how our school did, as a whole.
I
was stonewalled by the school administration, which certainly me wonder what
they were trying to hide? They truly
circled the wagons and my only source of information was the school attorney.
We
finally got the information after hiring our own lawyer to force the school to
release the scores. We broke the story that our high school and junior high
were in the bottom 25 percent of the country!
The stories created a sensation.
Pretty
soon the Superintendent (who was a very good friend) and the principals were
gone. School board members were
replaced. Graduation requirements went
up to 24 credit hours and the campus was closed.
The
parents were irate to read about the horrible scores, as they should have been.
And this episode surely showed the importance of transparency.
At
one point that superintendent complained at a Rotary meeting, which I was
attending, that he was a victim of “the power of the press.”
I
had to stand up and explain that, “No, he was incorrect. What was happening here was the ‘power of
information.’”
And
that is what is being discussed right now as this tentative bill goes forward.
Although
the state’s economy is improving, one of our biggest problems is that the
people do not know where the tax money that is already being collected is being
spent.
With
transparency and open records, the “power of information” will be given to
concerned citizens and groups, which will make all our governmental agencies
more accountable.
Publisher
Bonnar wrote a fine editorial about the proposed bill, of which part of which is
as follows:
“Passage of this bill should provide that
motivation, as it allows public officials to be charged with a misdemeanor if
they fail to produce requested records within the allotted time out of
negligence, but more importantly it makes the offense a felony if records are
‘knowingly or intentionally’ withheld from the public.
“Legislators will be hearing how
‘concerned’ government officials are about that provision, and that is exactly
why they need to pass the bill. If officials aren’t concerned about what
happens when they don’t allow access to public documents, citizens won’t ever
have the access they are entitled to. It is time to let the sun shine on public
business in Wyoming, and the best way to accomplish that is to go after the
officials who deliberately try to keep us in the dark.”
Wyoming is loaded with public agencies at
all levels, that are spending the public’s money. And let’s assume that dedicated
and honest public servants operate most of them. This bill can help shed much
needed light on all of them. It is long
overdue.
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