ZACHARY: General Assembly should make transparency top priority

State lawmakers should make local government transparency a high priority in the next legislative session of the General Assembly.

Open government benefits everyone, except those with something to hide.

Existing open government laws in Georgia are good but not great.

Without getting too deep in the weeds, the single biggest problem with the Georgia Open Records Act is that there are far too many exceptions.

While the Act itself requires very narrow interpretations and applications of the law, over the years since 2012 when the current Act was ratified more and more exceptions have been carved out.

All exceptions should live in one document that is easily searchable and lawmakers should have clear and compelling reasons for every single exception.

The General Assembly should also revisit the compliance period for local government agencies to respond to specific requests. While three business days is a very reasonable period for local agencies to respond to a records request, allowing a production to satisfy that response time requirement often ends up being a ruse.

The vast majority of all public records should be supplied to the public within the three business days and production letters instead of the actual records should only be permitted in the most narrow of circumstances.

With regard to the Georgia Open Meetings Act, the single biggest flaw in the law is what we commonly call the quorum language.

As it stands now, local governments are required to provide public notice of all meetings where a quorum will be present. Additionally, any meeting of a quorum of any public agency must be open to the public.

The problem with the quorum language is what it does not say. The law does not say that any group less than quorum cannot meet privately to deliberate public business.

As a result, local officials often deliberate the public’s business in secret with smaller group meetings, sometimes with a non-elected bureaucrat acting as a conduit for discussions among two or more smaller groups, essentially leveraging a looping in the Open Meetings Act.

No two or more members of the same elected body should deliberate the public’s business in private. That one statement would eliminate the quorum language loophole and instantly create more transparency in local government.

Jim Zachary is the editor of The Valdosta Daily Times, CNHI’s director of newsroom training and development and president emeritus of the Georgia First Amendment Foundation.