If open records laws don’t mean what they say, if they have no teeth, if they’re routinely disregarded by public officials, they’re not much good.
Such laws, among other things, help keep governments from operating in secret, from alleging things that are not true and from spending money that is not accounted for.
The Tennessee state Senate put some teeth in the state’s open records law Thursday, passing a measure – with no opposition – that prohibits the destruction of records subject to pending open records requests and requires governments to retain records related to such requests for at least 12 months.
The measure grew out of a Hamilton County government denial of a request by the Times Free Press for records it apparently was entitled to about the number of public requests for open records that had been made. Subsequently, charges to view the records were requested from the newspaper in an apparent violation of state law, and later the records that were requested were reported to have been destroyed.
If public records laws are flouted so egregiously when requested by an entity that openly serves the public, it’s chilling to imagine how requests by an average citizen might be handled.