The Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas hosted a conference last week decrying the 50th anniversary of the Texas Public Information Act.
Texas politicians, journalists, and policy experts called on the state to update its decades-old public information law, which they claim government officials abuse to withhold information from the public. Several speakers alleged state officials and employees ignore and even violate the law.
Bill Girdner, the editor of Courthouse News Service, won the foundation’s James Madison Award. In a speech, he said when public information requests are delayed the requested information becomes irrelevant to the news cycle. The digitization of public records, he claimed, has further delayed requests that previously took as little as a day to complete.
“I compare news to bread — it’s fresh on the day it’s made, it’s stale the next, and after two weeks, bread is good for croutons, and the ‘news’ just isn’t news,” said Girdner, according to The Texas Tribune.
Local governmental entities have also limited or delayed the release of public information. In one instance, Dallas ISD tried to charge The Dallas Express a prohibitive $9,000 for emails related to the district’s sex education curriculum for young students.
In another instance, Dallas County refused to provide The Dallas Morning News with data from officials’ mapping of local fentanyl overdoses. For its part, the City of Dallas told the news outlet it would need extra time to review and fulfill its public information request.
As The Dallas Express reported, Dallasites have expressed a desire for the City to demonstrate more transparency, the alleged lack of which has elicited much criticism.
Robert Henneke, executive director and general counsel at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, claimed, “[T]he process itself is not set up to succeed.”
He argued that there are legitimate exceptions to the public information law, such as individuals’ private information, but claimed that such exceptions are applied liberally by Texas agencies to withhold information. He said his organization had to file a lawsuit to obtain public records on solar panel usage, according to The Texas Tribune.
Nevertheless, the Texas government made efforts to update its public information process. A new law was enacted last month to better define “business days” as they pertain to turnaround estimates made by government officials.
Kelley Shannon, executive director of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas, claimed the state’s public information process was abused during the COVID-19 pandemic when the government was short on staff hours.
“They just made up their own rules for when they were open and closed,” Shannon said, per The Texas Tribune.
Sen. Lois Kolkhorst (R-Brenham), who chairs the Texas Senate’s Health and Human Services Committee, said the state declined to share what facilities had high levels of COVID-19 deaths during the pandemic citing medical privacy.
“We are living in a politically volatile time in Texas and in our nation,” Kolkhorst said during the keynote address at the event, according to The Texas Tribune. “Whether it was COVID, or how Texas is addressing the border crisis, or the upcoming debate over public education, or the hundreds of other political debates filling our days, we as Texans and Americans seem to be stifled by public skepticism. One of the remedies for skepticism must be to increase the pursuit of public information, to knock down the walls between the government and the governed.”
