Don't Weaken Records Law

The Commercial Appeal

Memphis

March 19, 2006

Any good lobbyist will tell you there's more than one way to kill a law.

The most obvious way, of course, would be to bring it back before the legislative body that passed it and ask for an outright repeal.

That way might work if the law in question clearly isn't in the public's best interests. But the opposite is true -- if it's really a good law that's opposed by people with narrow political agendas -- then sneakier methods are sometimes necessary.

Which brings us to the latest attempts to amend Tennessee's open records law by carving out several new exceptions.

State legislators have been discussing a bill that would exempt vehicle crash reports from the law. And another to keep state animal disease records secret. And yet another to conceal the home addresses of judges.

This method of attacking the open records law can be called "death by a thousand cuts."

It seems as though lawmakers are often asked to consider new exceptions to the law. The reasons for hiding certain records from public view can be pretty lame.

And if the law is gradually weakened year after year, eventually it won't have much more effectiveness than if it had been repealed outright.

Consider this year's lineup of proposed exemptions.

Supporters of the accident report amendment supposedly are concerned that chiropractors might use such records to drum up business. That logic overlooks two points: 1) There's already a state law on the books that makes it a crime to use accident reports for solicitation purposes, and 2) any inconvenience experienced by accident victims who are approached by chiropractors is far less important than the benefit of having these records available to the public.

What if, for example, a high-ranking elected official or celebrity were involved in a car crash, but got away without a ticket? How could citizens evaluate whether the accident was handled without any favoritism?

The exemption for animal disease records has more frightening possibilities. If a cow in Tennessee gets mad cow disease or a chicken gets bird flu, citizens have a right to know where those animals were kept and where other animals from the same farms might have entered the food supply. Protecting a farmer's privacy in such cases pales in comparison to the public's interests.

As for judges keeping their home addresses secret, an argument could be made that such a move would protect jurists from people who make death threats against them.

But, sadly enough, death threats could be made against any public official in Tennessee. If judges get the exemption this year, will state legislators, county commissioners and city council members be next in line for exemptions?

Citizens throughout the state should be able to find out where their elected officials live. How else could they know if the mayor's street got paved before anyone else's, or if a prominent developer happens to live next to the county commissioner who cast the deciding vote in a controversial land-use case?

The open records law is meant to make government in Tennessee transparent to citizens because openness breeds accountability. It's hard to argue against that kind of logic. But it's comparatively easy to strip away some of the law's openness, little by little.

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