My Sunday St. Augustine Record Guest Column: Are we slaves to government secrecy?

Guest Column: Are we slaves to government secrecy?
Posted: November 8, 2014 - 11:46pm
By ED SLAVIN
St. Augustine

Tuesday, the people of St. Augustine elected Nancy Shaver as Mayor, empowered by a decade of disclosures about our flawed city government.

We owe this election to the 3.8 million Florida voters who enacted Article I, Section 24 of our Florida Constitution on Nov. 3, 1992 (83 percent of the vote), enshrining our Florida Sunshine laws. Those laws are still too-often disrespected, but are arguably stronger than our federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA). Our Department of the Interior flouts FACA in implementing the federal St. Augustine 450th Commemoration Commission, unconvincingly claimed to be an “operating committee,” not an advisory committee. That Commission meets at 12:30 p.m. Nov. 15, 2014, at the Casa Monica Hotel.

I have requested to open the meeting under FACA and speak about the proposed St. Augustine National Historical Park and National Seashore (www.staugustgreen.com).

On Nov. 21, 1974, our United States Senate enacted the Freedom of Information Act, joining the House in voting to override a veto by President Gerald Ford (whose veto was pushed on him by then-DOJ lawyer, Antonin Scalia, and White House aides Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who wanted government to remain secretive).

I was 17, a “hick from the sticks” — first-semester Georgetown University freshman, an intern known for my walking/working speed in Senator Ted Kennedy’s office as “Fast Eddie.” I carried three stacks of Senator Kennedy’s legal-sized, stapled, freshly-mimeographed press release to three Senate press galleries, cheering the veto override and enactment of the Freedom of Information Act.

I read it on the Senate/Capitol subway, promising transparency. I walked up a marble staircase, past a gigantic painting of Lincoln with his cabinet, signing the Emancipation Proclamation. My heart leaped with joy.

Eight years later, as Appalachian Observer editor, I used FOIA to ask for government data on mercury pollution; a long kept secret by Union Carbide’s Y-12 nuclear bomb builders in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. We won, and on May 17, 1983, the largest mercury pollution event in world history was declassified — 4.2 million pounds of mercury emitted into the environment and workers’ lungs and brains, which continues leaking into creeks and groundwater today (subject of a new $125 million mercury cleanup plant advocated by Senator Lamar Alexander).

Nuclear weapons plants cleanup may be achieved by circa 2057, by my 100th birthday, at a cost that may top $300 billion.

Forty years after FOIA, Americans work to hold our governments accountable, seeking to breathe life into open records laws.

As Ben Franklin said in Philadelphia after our Constitutional Convention in 1787, we have “a republic, if [we] can keep it.” Will we?

We Americans ended slavery, but can we ever stop being slaves to secrecy?

We Americans eradicated smallpox and polio, but can we ever eradicate political corruption?

Enough flummery.

We must make our governments more transparent.

Governments must disclose the people’s business, using internet websites.

This empowers us to ask questions, demand answers and elect real leaders, who listen and learn.

Governments must announce agendas two weeks before meetings.

Governments must place contracts and spending online.

Government officials must disclose lobbyists’ ex parte contacts on forms, before meetings — not just verbally.

Governments must require lobbyist registration and disclosure.

Governments must swear in legislative and quasi-judicial hearing witnesses.

Governments must allow public comment on every agenda item, as at St. Johns County Commission and St. Augustine Beach.

Let us have a government truly “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” as Lincoln promised at Gettysburg.

Let us have what Nancy Shaver calls a “no surprises” government. Now.


Comments (1)
Gloria Danvers 11/09/14 - 09:08 am 10What a wonderful and powerful
What a wonderful and powerful statement you make, Ed. I hope people are listening.



Horace Rockwood
Horace Rockwood 11/10/14 - 08:33 am 23Secrecy Hides Corruption
Ed, I especially enjoyed your exposure of Scalia, Cheney, and Rumsfeld as adherents of secrecy in government, and I can't help but wonder about how much different and better off our country would be if that black-hearted triumvirate had never risen to power.

For a Democracy to flourish, the sine qua non ["without which nothing"] is transparency. The citizens have a need to know what's going on (I'm breathlessly waiting for the two new [un]free trade agreements to come to light), and we have a Constitutional Right to know all. The secret negotiations about the trade agreements can exist only because the government doesn't want us to know how much we're going to get screwed yet once more by "trade" agreements that again protect those who have (copyrights and patents) and further damage those who have not.

Congratulations on an excellent column!