EDITORIAL: State should strengthen public records law

No matter how much the Legislature has on its plate, no matter how important and deep the agendas of party leaders, lawmakers can count on government figures asking for more power to limit public access to public business.

Every regular session, the bill drafts pile up seeking changes to the state’s open meeting and public records laws. Some seek exemptions. Some seek “clarifications” that would allow officials to keep more actions confidential and deny public requests for information. And lawmakers who defend the public’s right to know what government is doing suffer from a credibility problem: The Legislature is exempt from the open meeting law. (It shouldn’t be, and a Wednesday Review-Journal editorial said so.)

With public distrust of and disengagement from government rising, the worst thing lawmakers could do this year is make it easier for Nevada governments to shut citizens out. If governments can block public scrutiny of documents — everything from emails to contracts — watchdogs can’t root out abuses and hold officials accountable for their decisions. The Review-Journal’s 22nd of 25 policy recommendations to the Nevada Legislature in 25 days: strengthen, don’t weaken, the state’s open meeting and public records laws.

One of the most alarming proposals to weaken public access to government comes from the Nevada League of Cities and Municipalities. Nevada’s public records law allows a government to pass along steep bills if a request requires “extraordinary use of its personnel or technological resources.” The league wants to define what constitutes “extraordinary use” so its members can charge so much money for requests that media and individuals don’t bother making them.

Governments already try to stymie records requests with five-figure bills, largely because they want to bill the public for having a censor redact records. They’re not allowed to charge the public for redactions — which result from their practice of deliberately commingling confidential and public records — but they do anyway. Lawmakers should reject the league’s bill.

The Legislature should take the opposite approach and work to improve public access to government. Today, if a government entity refuses to comply with a public records request, the only way to hold that entity accountable is to sue and have a judge order the release of documents. The creation of a public records ombudsman, preferably within the attorney general’s office (which enforces the state’s open meeting law), would be a good start toward resolving records disputes without costly litigation. And the law could use clarification that all electronically stored data are public records, even if they don’t exist as paper documents. The public has a right to inspect computer records, too — without being charged exorbitant fees for printouts.

No doubt, some lobbyists and government officials will argue that the open meeting law, and especially the public records law, exist primarily for the benefit of nosy journalists who want to berate and embarrass the public sector. But that’s fundamentally false. People who are not journalists, average taxpayers who are seeking answers on their own, make public records requests all the time. Under the law, it doesn’t matter whether the person who requests records is the only one who’ll see them or whether the documents will be reported to an audience of hundreds of thousands.

Government and its work belong to the people, not the government. Nevada lawmakers should remember that.