Sunshine State

The brouhaha over requested public records that broke out a recent county commission meeting is something from which commissioners can take a lesson.

In Florida there is this pesky thing known as Statute 119 that mandates open government meetings and records. The language has been law for years, though state lawmakers make an annual run at opening whatever loopholes they can, Still, the state lives by and prides itself on a set of laws that became a model for much of the country.

Government meetings are intended for public consumption. Let the sunshine in. Governmental records, or at least most, are public records. Let the sunshine in.

That’s how it is done in Florida and has been for years. Government is supposed to be a public service, what is government’s is the public’s.

So to see Commissioner Pinki Jackel express open hostility and condescension in a public meeting toward an individual who made a recent public records request for correspondence from the commissioners was unsettling.

The tussle going on, internally and externally, among the seafood workers and the association advocating for them is messy and has as many sides as there are voices in the melee.

Accusations have been tossed like verbal hand grenades and there has been upheaval in the organizational structure of the association.

The commissioner in question may also have a personal ax to grind with the individual who filed the public records request, or maybe she finds this individual not very likeable.

Who knows because none of it matters one whit.

A person from the public sector can request at their pleasure any public record. If the governmental entity, in this case the county, believes it is not public record, officials can cite that provision in the law in their denial of the request.

But other than that, government must comply and there needn’t be provided a reason or rationale behind the request. The county in this case has to simply meet the request in a timely manner.

That time frame is pretty well mapped out in the manual for Government in the Sunshine.

Government is free to charge a reasonable rate if copying or what have you is done, reasonable costs having pretty much been settled through the years in Attorney General opinions on questions from local governments.

That is about it, though. The records are public; the public is entitled to review them if desired.

Government has no right or standing to ask anything in return but reimbursement. Place it under the umbrella of public service.

And the records in question, correspondence including electronic mail, are in the public domain. That includes e-mails concerning business before the county or involving public money that originate on a computer at home, work or play.

An elected official can not cherry pick what correspondence or e-mail to turn over; they can not delete things they don’t want others to see.

Once an elected official, a significant part of your life is open to constituents, whether they voted for you or not. It is part of the tradeoff of public service, which is, as we remind and remind in this space, what government is supposed to be about.

But even when, as was clearly the case, commissioners have a bee in their bonnet about a particular public records request, it is hardly appropriate to take up the request, by chance of the individual addressing the board on a different matter, in a public setting.

A commissioner effectively acted like a bully bent on disparaging or embarrassing the individual who made the public records request. She was rude, undignified, defensive and wasted public time and dollars - convening a meeting isn’t free - on a personal disagreement.

Somebody who believed there surely couldn’t be anything to hide could easily have come away from that meeting feeling like that commissioner definitely had something to hide.

And it was all so unnecessary.

Commissioners take an oath of office upon election. They swear to uphold the laws of the state. The so-called Sunshine Laws are among those.

There is even a manual written about the Sunshine Laws. Understanding them could not be easier.

But there are clearly commissioners, in this county and elsewhere, who could use a refresher course on their role as public servants in Florida.