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Former Senator: Not Much Government In The Florida Sunshine

Tom Hagerty/flickr

This is Government in the Sunshine Week, a week celebrating the importance of open government and freedom of information.

The recent firing of Florida Department of Law Enforcement Commissioner Gerald Bailey is an example of government leaders making decisions out of the public purview – violating the spirit of Sunshine Week and Florida’s Sunshine Law.

Under Florida law, Bailey’s removal should have been discussed and voted on publicly by Governor Rick Scott and the three members of the Florida Cabinet. It wasn’t. It seems to have instead been engineered by Cabinet aides and staffers. 

The First Amendment Foundation and other groups are suing over Bailey’s forced resignation. They say it violated the Sunshine Law and deserves an independent investigation.

Former Republican state Senator Paula Dockery is now a newspaper columnist who says there are no consequences for government leaders who choose to do public business in private.

Dockery told WLRN too much is being done to skirt the law.

You wrote about your own experience trying to get public records from state agencies. How does that apply to a lack of government in the sunshine?

When the legislature is trying to pass some legislation that departments are in favor of, the information is freely flowing and we’re able to gain access to that rather easily. But, when a legislator goes against what an agency or what an administration wants for that agency, then getting that information is very difficult.

In two different instances during my time in the Legislature, I had to make official public records requests to try and get the information. In one case, they shipped me 28 boxes of documents. They were not in any file folders, documents weren’t stapled together. It was just a lot of loose paper that didn’t seem to be in any order.

I was in the middle of a legislative session, and they were making it extremely difficult to make sense of the information. When I made follow up requests for a very specific piece of information, it was withheld until after the crucial vote.

So you’ve got a couple of tactics going on there. One is what I call the data dump where they bury you in information so that they’ve filled the request, but they’ve done it in a way that makes it very difficult for you to make heads or tails out of it. The second is when you make a specific request – then they can use stalling tactics to give you the information in what they consider a timely fashion but which doesn’t meet the parameters of your needs.   

Would you say that Florida has a big problem with a lack of government in the sunshine? Is it better or worse than it was when you were in office?

I think there are a lot of inherent problems with even those people who are trying to comply because of technology. You have a lot of people using their personal phone. They’re texting, emailing, Facebooking – you have a lot of information in a lot of different areas. So, it’s hard to, even when you’re trying to fully comply, make sure you’re doing it correctly.

Additionally, you have agencies that are very busy. Responding to requests is time consuming and a little difficult. They may want to charge a reasonable fee to do so, which may strike some people who can’t afford it as excessively high. So there are some legitimate concerns on both sides.

But I would say that there is in the Legislature an intention to skirt the public records laws – the government in the sunshine laws – and I think we saw a good example of that with the governor and Cabinet on using aides as though having information passed through somebody else means that it no longer is subject to government in the sunshine. So I think you’re finding ways that people are trying to work around the process, and that’s very concerning.

What do you think is the solution to all of this?

As it affects the governor and the executive branch, I would say that there just needs to be some teeth in the law and there needs to be some good watch dogging to ferret out when things are being done outside the sunshine. The Legislature is not without guilt as well. There are a lot of things that are done in the legislative process that are done behind the scenes, especially when it comes to the budget.

I’d say that the biggest threat to the law is that there really isn’t any teeth in it. So when you violate it, what happens? Nothing. You don’t get thrown out of office, you don’t pay a fine, you don’t have to rectify it. It’s almost like it’s a suggestion rather than something you’re supposed to abide by.

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