In some cases, the bills hit resistance only after reporters caught on and began writing about them.
In Iowa, the House passed a bill to shield the audio of many 911 calls by declaring them confidential “medical records” after the AP used the open-records law to expose a series of gun-related accidents involving minors in one rural county. The plan died in the Senate after it was detailed in news reports, and media and civil rights groups raised objections.
Days later, the potential impact of the bill became clear when a beloved state celebrity, farmer Chris Soules of “The Bachelor” fame, was charged with leaving the scene of a deadly accident. A 911 call that would have remained confidential under the bill painted a far more sympathetic picture of Soules’ actions, showing he immediately reported the crash and sought aid for the 66-year-old victim.
Iowa lawmakers succeeded in passing another anti-transparency bill, approving unprecedented secrecy for the state’s $1 billion gambling industry by closing access to the detailed annual financial statements of the state’s 19 licensed casinos. Those records had been public for decades. The change came in response to lobbying from casinos, which had objected to a request from an out-of-state competitor for the records by claiming they contained proprietary information.
Florida has some of the nation’s strongest open-records and open-meetings laws, but that did not stop lawmakers from trying to tinker with them. This year, they passed 19 new exemptions to the Sunshine Law, the second most in at least two decades. The details of how public universities investigate cyberattacks and prepare for emergencies are now confidential. The identities of people who witness murders, use medical marijuana or get injured or killed at workplaces must also be withheld.
“I think the sheer number of new exemptions that were created was a bit alarming. It was almost a record. That’s never good,” said Barbara Petersen, president of the First Amendment Foundation in Tallahassee, who has tracked transparency legislation in Florida since the 1990s.
One of the worst for the public’s right to know, Petersen said, is a bill requiring records of criminal charges that result in acquittal or dismissal to be automatically sealed. She asked Gov. Rick Scott to veto the measure, arguing it would harm public safety by depriving employers of relevant information about onetime suspects who avoided convictions for any number of reasons. Scott ended up signing the bill, which supporters say will protect the wrongly accused from employment and reputational repercussions.
Still, many other bills that concerned Petersen were defeated, including measures that would have kept secret the names of applicants for top university jobs and allowed members of government boards to have more private meetings.
A host of these individual exemptions strike me as appropriate privacy protections.