Opinion

We spend a lot of time talking about public records in our office. If that’s a new topic to you, you’ll find it worth your time to become familiar. State law enacted in 1985 requires that most publicly funded entities make their records available to the public for inspection or copying. That’s an important piece of government transparency; those records belong to the public and they help keep our elected officials accountable. Although news organizations request documents regularly in the course of their research and reporting, there are no special privileges. Anything available to a journalist is also available to you. There are some problems with the law. At nearly 40 years old, there is no provision for emailing records, but there are stipulations about faxing them. The only deadline an agency has is to respond to be prompt and reasonable, which is undefined. And the only remedy for noncompliance is to file a lawsuit or persuade your local district attorney to file a misdemeanor charge against his fellow government employee who works across the hall. Some agencies are very, very good about keeping the public’s business public. Others are not. In the past year, Oklahoma Watch has filed three lawsuits to force agencies to comply with the Open Records Act. Two were successful and one, against the Tulsa Police Department, remains open.