HUNTINGTON —
A new group in West Virginia hopes to help residents and public officials better understand laws that allow access to public documents, information and government meetings.
The West Virginia Open Government Coalition, which includes members of the press, state universities and nonprofit groups, recently won a $15,000 grant from the National Freedom of Information Coalition to get started.
The money will fund an office at Marshall University, where a graduate student will design and maintain a Web site. Members of the group also have plans for educational seminars for public officials and to provide answers to urgent questions by phone.
West Virginia may be the last state in the country to get such a group, according to Corley Dennison, dean of Marshall’s School of Journalism and Mass Communications. Until recently, West Virginia and Wyoming were the holdouts, he said, and last year Wyoming saw the inauguration of its own open government group.
“We’re hoping that situation will be corrected by what we do here,” Dennison said.
From property deeds to the number of patients currently in the state’s two public psychiatric hospitals, a vast wealth of information is legally open to public scrutiny. But too often, members of the public are denied access to that material and are shut out of government meetings that should be open, coalition members said.
“Sometimes public officials get rather territorial, and they like to possess information and control it, when it belongs to the public who paid for it,” said Bonnie Stewart, a group member and West Virginia University journalism professor.
“People think they’re trying to protect the body they work for when in fact, when you sit on public information, you make it look like you’re hiding something,” she said.
Though West Virginia enacted its open meeting and public information laws more than 30 years ago, officials at all levels of government — local, county and state — have either questioned or ignored the laws’ provisions, according to a 2007 Associated Press review of compliance audits.
What’s more, West Virginia makes appealing denials of requests for information particularly difficult, since there’s only one way to contest such a refusal.
“You have to go to court,” Stewart said. “You have to file a lawsuit. That’s pretty stringent.”
Lawmakers and court officials have also carved out numerous exemptions to the laws. Last year, the state Supreme Court overturned a lower court’s finding that some e-mails of former Chief Justice Elliott “Spike” Maynard were subject to the Freedom of Information Act, ruling that the content of the e-mails did not rise to the level of public interest.
That prompted Delegate Barbara Fleischauer, D-Monongalia, to introduce a bill during this year’s regular legislative session that would change the law so that the context in which materials are produced could also be taken into account.
In the case, the e-mails were sent by Maynard to Massey Energy chief Don Blankenship as Maynard was engaging in an ultimately futile bid to win the Democratic Party nomination for another term on the court.
Fleischauer’s bill didn’t pass this session, but she plans to introduce a similar measure next year. Situations like the one that prompted her to introduce the legislation show the need for something like the open government group, she said.
“There’s a lot that people don’t know about freedom of information law,” she said. “For example, people don’t realize how many exemptions there are, or even the best way to use the law.”
