John C. Moritz, USA TODAY Network Austin Bureau 5/27/2017
AUSTIN – As a young lawyer and activist in the early 1970s, Buck Wood recalls that prying loose information and records from the hands of government bureaucrats was so onerous that even members of the Legislature were routinely stiff-armed.
“It was so bad that the state treasurer refused to tell the Legislature which banks he was depositing state money in and how much interest was being earned,” recalled Wood, now considered one of the state’s foremost legal authority on open government laws. “They asked and he wouldn’t do it.”
Then, in the wake of the infamous Sharpstown stock fraud scandal that toppled numerous political careers in the Texas Capitol, Wood worked with dozens of the newly elected lawmakers and a new state attorney general to craft a law that would become the national model for government transparency.
But over the past several years, Wood said, he’s seen a shift in attitude in the interpretation of the state's "sunshine laws," from the stated policy that all government records were considered to be public to one of push back at all levels of government where records are held secret unless the state attorney general’s office rules otherwise.
That new approach was effectively cemented in law two years ago when the Texas Supreme Court ruled in a case involving the aircraft giant, Boeing, that the contracts of private companies doing business with government entities could be shielded from public view if releasing the details would put the companies at a competitive disadvantage.
That court ruling has since been used at various levels of government to withhold the details of transactions with private entities.
Early optimism for open government
Advocates of robust government transparency policies entered the 2017 legislative session optimistic that the state’s Public Information Act could be fine-tuned to reinstall the principal that all government records are presumed public unless the attorney general’s office rules otherwise.
More:
http://www.reporternews.com/story/news/local/texas/2017/05/27/open-government-pioneer-sees-sunshine-laws-peril/351032001/
