EDITORIAL: Secrecy shrouds all levels of government

Everybody pull out your Macaulay Culkin shocked-face masks. Hillary Clinton, another relic of the 1990s, engaged in secretive and possibly illegal communications at the highest levels of government. During her four-year stint as secretary of state in the Obama administration, Mrs. Clinton not only used her private account for all email communications, but she did so on a private server located in her New York home. Talk about covering your tracks.

Now the debate rages about whether Mrs. Clinton compromised national security or broke any laws or department regulations, not to mention whether this should completely derail her 2016 presidential aspirations. Unbelievable, right?

Actually, it’s completely believable. This is really no surprise at all. Government secrecy is not exclusively a Hillary Clinton problem or a federal government problem. Hostility to transparency exists everywhere, at all levels of government, including right here in Southern Nevada.

Sunshine Week, which began Sunday, is the perfect time to point out government’s opaqueness and demand change.

Elected officials can easily use private, web-based email accounts for any business that’s remotely political or controversial, as opposed to government-generated email accounts that provide a public record. Some public officials also pay for their own cellphones so the public can’t have access to their text messages or call records.

Unelected, well-paid public employees actively work to create policies that completely undermine the public’s right to know, such as the city of Henderson forbidding its employees from talking to the media without permission from administrators. That policy was in place for several months before the Review-Journal exposed it, forcing the city to walk it back. You, the taxpayer, paid the people who wrote that policy and never told you about it. And the elected members of the Henderson City Council, which is supposed to represent its citizens, either supported the policy or had no knowledge of it, with neither case reflecting well on the council.

In another recent bid to keep the public in the dark, lobbyists representing Clark County, the cities of Las Vegas and Henderson, the Clark County School District, UNLV, the Nevada System of Higher Education, the state Department of Corrections and Las Vegas police all testified in favor of Senate Bill 28 in Carson City earlier this month. The bill is written to discourage the public and the press from submitting requests for government records by making even simple reviews of documents cost prohibitive, allowing governments to levy steep fees for any request requiring “extraordinary use” of government resources. The definition of “extraordinary use” covers the most ordinary requests, including document releases totaling as few as 25 pages, showing that this bill is nothing but a means by which to keep the public from knowing what its governments are doing.

The school district has refused to release the email addresses of its 18,000 teachers, even though the Nevada Supreme Court has ruled the content of email messages sent from government-issued accounts are public records. It will take a Supreme Court ruling to make those email addresses public, but that won’t stop governments from refusing to release obviously public records. They face no penalties for violating the public records law.

All these efforts and more shield huge amounts of public business from public scrutiny. The disdain for transparency is everywhere in government. Keep that in mind not only during Sunshine Week, but as you cast your ballot in the upcoming municipal elections.