Opinion: Too many anti-openness bills

Legislators have figured out two ways to roll back open-government this year. Claim any bill will fight terrorism or protect privacy, and boom, it's on the fast track. Even terrible ideas such as Rep. Rob Wallace's measure to drive the government contracting business behind closed doors, or Sen. Buddy Dyer's to criminalize the use of a person's name without his or her written consent.

Bad policy makes bad law, but a flawed legislative process does, too. Most of these bills have one thing in common -- they weren't thought out, vetted by public interest groups or adequately deliberated. Given the constitutional protection of open government in Florida, there should be a better way for writing legislation that limits access to public records and meetings.

Some bills, such as the one (HB 1951) offered by Wallace, R-Tampa, are altogether wrong. He wants to change the law so that the hiring of publicly paid consultants and vendors would be conducted in secret. But Florida awards these contracts in public for a reason: It's the people's money, and the people deserve to know how it's being spent. If Wallace's bill were to pass, the public would not know, until after the fact, whether the bidding competition was fair, whether contractors were qualified or whether influence was exerted to give one firm the edge.

Wallace said he's trying to protect trade secrets. But existing law already does that. It specifically protects trade secrets, corporate financial statements and sealed bids. Further closing the door, as Wallace's bill and several others try to do, would make it impossible to determine whether firms won contracts based on merit, whether minority-owned businesses were given a chance or whether companies with poor past performance still managed to obtain government contracts.

Few legislators have given much thought to the implications of closing access to public information. The problem is not openness, or even the Internet, which if used properly, can help Floridians access records to which they have a legal and constitutional right. The problem is with the accidental release of legally exempt information. On that score, a bill (HB 1679) to establish a study commission on public records could help in this debate, by laying a broad architecture for public access. One reason the number of anti-openness bills reached a record this year is that legislators were calling for exemptions that already were on the books. They didn't know the law. That's no way to control the flow of information in a democracy.

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