Posted on: Friday, May 6, 2005

EDITORIAL
Decisions on openness shouldn't be whimsical

There's no question that being custodian of public records can be a headache. People come by all the time, demanding to rummage through the files and make use of public information for their own private purposes.

So it's inevitable that these custodians often find ways to avoid release of information: It's not available in the form you want it; it would be too expensive to compile it; it's actually stored somewhere else; we suspect you want to use this information for wrong purposes; and so forth.

One of the best along these lines we have heard in a long time sounded as if it came directly out of Joseph Heller's "Catch 22."

Reporter Jim Dooley asked the Child Support Enforcement Agency for copies of some 42 "enforcement orders" against parents who were seriously delinquent in their child-support payments.

These are public documents that anyone, if they happened to know the name of the person involved, could look up for himself. But if you don't happen to know the name, no luck.

An opinion out of the Office of Information Practices concluded that, yes, these are public but "they're just not accessible."

That's like the officer in Catch 22 who told his men they were free to come into his office with their problems any time they wanted to, but only when he wasn't there.

It's also a first cousin of a concept apparently alive and well in the judicial system in which legal documents are so buried in the vaults, so tough to get, that, although they are technically public, they are "practically obscure."

That is, open in theory but obscure from a practical standpoint.

The not-so-laughable point here is that decisions about what records are public and what are not should not be made on the basis of the convenience of the record-keeper or to what end the information should be used.

If there is a good reason to keep a document confidential — and indeed there are a limited number of such reasons — then specifically exempt them from the open-records law.

But if the law says a government record is public, then it should be so, not just in theory, but in practice.