Public information: It belongs to taxpayers

In the 20 years I've worked at The Free Press, I have come up against numerous government agencies and public institutions who didn't want to share information the newspaper deemed important to our role as government watchdog.

From state agencies, to local government units, even obscure quasi-government hybrid institutions, governments from time to time resist releasing information they consider "too sensitive."

Of course, sometimes they would stonewall you just to avoid releasing information that would be embarrassing or that would create a public uproar. In other cases, there are nuanced legal issues involved.

It is sometimes no small feat for newspapers to unearth the public information needed to tell important stories, stories that help citizens influence how their governments are run, and how those governments use taxpayer dollars.

So newspapers, and we at The Free Press, have standard operating procedures when government refuses to provide information we deem public by law. We have reference materials that provide us with basic information from various units of government that is "always public," unequivocally under the law.

We send or fax the agency a form letter that requests the specific information we believe is public. We ask the agency to cite the statute they believe keeps that information nonpublic.
Then we can involve our newspaper association attorney who is an expert on such things to decide if they agency has a legitimate argument or not.

In Minnesota, the burden of proof is usually on the government agency to say why information is not public. The media, and the public, should not have to have law degrees to ask for public information. That's as it should be.

But average citizens must know that the media has no more right to public information than the public at large. Anything that we can get, you can get. No questions asked.

Of course, it's easier for government bureaucracies to stonewall average citizens who don't have the ability to publish a story in the newspaper. We know our position gives us a little more leverage in securing this public information, and we're happy to do just that on behalf of the taxpayers and the public.

I'm always kind of amazed that public officials seem to forget just who owns the information they are keeping secret. It's not their information. It's the taxpayer's information.