Sunshine Week Aims to Improve Government Responsiveness – Ohio Public Records

Sunshine Week is upon us! America’s annual celebration of government transparency, marked by hundreds of speeches, workshops, proclamations, performances, news stories and press releases nationwide. In the spirit of Sunshine Week, we continue to focus on state sunshine laws in the United States; today we look at Ohio.

A records administrator in the City of Cleveland has mistakenly argued that records about the how long it takes the City to provide public records are confidential and not subject to public records request. The statements were made, under oath, by the records administrator submitted in a lawsuit filed a former fire department battalion chief. In Ohio, public records are the people’s records. The custodians of a record acts as a trustee for the people of the State of Ohio. Like all other states, certain records may be exempt from disclosure, but those records are specifically enumerated by statute.

Unfortunately, this case is not unusual. Experts say that public access to records is worse now than it was four years ago. Today, public officials are more likely to deny record requests, according to nearly half of the media experts surveyed in the “Forecasting Freedom of Information,” study. In the same study, more than one-third of survey respondents (38%) said they were denied records more frequently at all levels of government in the last four years. In addition, claimants filed lawsuits in every state in the country claiming that public officials did not produce public records within the statutorily required time period – or that they did not produce records at all.

The purpose of the Ohio Public Records Act is to protect democracy by ensuring an open government. The reality is that most government agencies want to comply with open records requests, but they struggle for the budget to hire employees to respond to requests, gather documents, make copies, and redact requested documents.

Technology can even automate the very manual redaction process most government entities use. With a solution in place to capture text messages, instant messages and all other channels used for communications it makes finding the right records and producing the full conversation easy. Clerks who used to request emails from all users, print out those emails, send them to legal for redaction, and then fax those emails to the requester can now search within one application for multiple individual’s communications, make use of automatic redaction tools that automatically scan documents for information which would be exempt from disclosure under state law, and make the batch available to legal for a spot check. A process that once took days or weeks could take seconds. Imagine the budget impact!

Our democracy depends upon having an informed, educated citizenry and an open, transparent government. Modern technology can help the sun shine in by making it easier and less time-consuming for officials to respond to public records requests.

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