In Sunshine Week, taking stock of shade and secrecy | Editorial

March 10-16 is Sunshine Week in Florida, when media organizations and open-government advocates highlight the state's broad public record laws. Here's what the Legislature did to limit those laws this year, and why the fight for open government matters.

Sunshine defines Florida in more ways than one.

It used to describe our state’s excellent tradition of requiring public access to public information. Unfortunately, our political leaders have an equally strong tradition of undermining access by burrowing into dark corners where records and interactions between public servants are kept secret.

Every year, as the legislative session ends, we take stock of the new ways in which lawmakers chip away at the public trust by blocking access to information that Floridians deserve to know. This year’s accounting falls on a weekend that historically salutes the bedrock Florida principle of government in the sunshine, which has been under sustained political attack for years.

The latest batch of shady bills that passed this session — some of which have been signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis — can be summed up by the declaration that things could have been worse.

What are they hiding?

But that’s grading on a generous scale, especially after passage of a 2023 law that has obliterated public access, even retroactively, to records of the governor’s travel, including the names of people with whom he meets.

That law, passed as Senate Bill 1616 a year ago and signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, is being challenged in a Florida court by The Washington Post in a case that could have far-reaching ramifications.

What is DeSantis hiding? We might never know.

One pro-secrecy bill that passed this year — HB 85, which obscures the identities of people who seek to set up banks in Florida, along with other information — is especially worrisome because of its potential to turn the Sunshine State into a haven for shady financial operations. Scams have always flourished in Florida, and scammers love secrecy.

Shamefully, only one legislator, Rep. Susan Valdés of Tampa, voted against it.

The latest secrets

Another bill, HB 379, keeps secret the financial information of companies bidding on road and public works projects, even though it is our money they want to spend.

Another bill, SB 474, would eliminate public access to video and pictures of suicides. This may appear rational, but it could thwart attempts to investigate the reality behind suspicious deaths.

A video released last week by the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office shows deputies interacting with an 87-year-old man who was apparently intending to shoot himself. Thanks to sheriff’s deputies’ good training and compassionate persuasion, the man was disarmed.

Had he died, the sheriff might have been blocked from disclosing footage that documented officers’ desperate determination to save a man’s life. That doesn’t make sense.

Too many public records exemptions are based on isolated anecdotal incidents. Their champions claim to be protecting crime victims or the need to protect public servants from retribution. But hiding information can also prevent important truths from coming to light.

The coldest shoulder

In Florida, the state and some local governments simply refuse to acknowledge requests for records not protected by exemptions.

In one closely watched case, a judge ruled that Boca Raton violated the public records law by failing to properly fulfill public records requests in a fight with a developer.

The Orlando Sentinel faced heavy resistance in its months-long battle to uncover basic details about a man hired to provide aid and comfort to a group of far-right school board members across the state — including how much he was being paid.

Reporters also had to fight to obtain the records from the Osceola County Sheriff’s Office that revealed the truth behind claims DeSantis made when he suspended Orlando-area State Attorney Monique Worrell from office.

Many of the prosecutorial failures DeSantis blamed on Worrell were actually due to factors beyond her office’s control.

News organizations’ resources have dwindled, but we still pay attorneys to use the public records law to nudge records from reluctant bureaucrats and to file lawsuits as a last resort.

As reporter Skyler Swisher notes, lawsuits are increasingly necessary to gain access to public records, but the government has unlimited resources to protect its secrets, using our taxpayer money to do so.

Most Floridians can’t compete with that. For them, tracking down public records they need to prove waste, fraud, abuse or political corruption is more difficult or even impossible.

In the meantime, elected officials seem to be growing bolder about holding secret meetings or establishing back-door means of communication to flout open-meetings laws. With changes in technology, lobbyists now rely on text messaging to influence decision-making, but state records-retention laws leave far too much discretion to elected officials, the custodians of those records.

This is why the Sun Sentinel and watchdog groups such as the First Amendment Foundation and Florida Center for Governmental Accountability continue to observe Sunshine Week (March 10-16 this year) and will fight year-round for transparency and accountability.

Blocking out the sunshine destroys trust and encourages wickedness to flourish. Floridians deserve better.

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writer Martin Dyckman and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.