Sunday marks the beginning of Sunshine Week, an annual effort to raise awareness of the importance of open government and freedom of information.
Over the course of the next week, the Free Press editorial page will publish a number of editorials that feature information obtained through open records requests. We also will discuss ways to improve government transparency and accountability and, hopefully, encourage citizens to use government open records and open meetings laws to hold policymakers and bureaucrats accountable.
Open records and freedom of information laws allow taxpayers to make sure that their hard-earned dollars are used well. Sunshine provisions, such as Tennessee’s Open Meetings Act, ensure the public’s business actually is conducted in public, rather than in the recesses of a smoke-filled room.
As an editorial writer and opinion page editor, and in my prior career as a policy analyst and government watchdog, open records have played a vital role in my ability to expose wasteful spending, abuse of power, hypocrisy, cronyism and corruption.
It was an open records request that allowed the free market think tank I founded to inform the world that environmental crusader Al Gore is actually an electricity-devouring hypocrite. A public record obtained from the Nashville Electric Service showed that Gore’s monthly electricity bills averaged $1,359 and his electric usage regularly reached 20 times the national household average.