FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT Game & Fish Reeled In

GOVERNOR WARNS COMMISSION TO BE OPEN

Gov. Mike Beebe showed the muscle a governor should on Friday.

He let the state Game & Fish Commission know quickly and in no uncertain terms that it should stop its end-around play to avoid compliance with the state’s Freedom of Information Act.

News broke on Friday that the commission was writing its own, more limited version of the law that guarantees Arkansas citizens access to the meetings and records of public bodies.

The commission, or at least some of its members and some lawyers who represent them, have this cockeyed idea that a constitutionally independent agency can write its own laws and ignore the one that governs others that receive and spend public money in this state.

Although the commission’s members are appointed by the state’s governor, the commission itself is an independent state agency as established under a constitutional amendment that took effect in 1945.

Beebe appointed four of the seven sitting Game & Fish commissioners, including two of three members of a governance committee that voted this week to pursue these less restrictive freedom of information rules for the agency. There is an eighth nonvoting commissioner; but it’s these seven who decide commission policy.

The three who seem to think their rules would supersede the state’s open meetings-open records law are Commissioners Emon Mahony and Rick Watkins, both Beebe appointees, and Chairman Craig Campbell, who was appointed by former Gov. Mike Huckabee.

We don’t know what the other commissioners think about the idea; but Beebe, who didn’t know any more than the rest of us about the commission run amok, is trying to squash it quickly.

He has a heavy hammer.

The governor said on Friday that he would support ending state funding for the commission if it does not comply with the established state law on freedom of information. That would theoretically leave the commission with little money to operate, if the Legislature were to agree todeny the funding.

Whether the commission pulls back on this ludicrous proposal is up to the commissioners, but the fact that they’ve come this far isseriously troubling.

The draft document that would create the new rules and regulations is a full-blown proposal, clearly developed over time and designed to control who sees what in the records of the agency and to limit who may know the business the commission does on the public’s behalf.

The four-page document might as well have read that the records of the Game & Fish Commission will be open “if the commission wants them open” and that the commission “may discuss whatever it wants in private, rather than in public, with pretty much anyone the commission wants.”

It is that big a departure from what the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act requires. The purpose of the FOI Act, itself originally passed in 1967, is to open governmentrecords and meetings to the people of this state.

There are exceptions to what must be public, but they are extremely limited and were determined not by the affected agency of government but by the state Legislature.

Taxpayers, including all those hunters and fishermen and others with strong interest in what the Game & Fish Commission regulates, need to pay attention here. This is a bad sign that at least some of the commissioners are a little too eager to take public business behind closed doors and to lock the people out of their records. It is, whether they like it or not, a signal that they have something to hide.

What’s more, if this is their definition of “independent,” the people - not just the governor - may need to reign this commission in. Voters, who gave the commission its independence, not to mention a large share of a dedicated 1 /8 percent conservation tax, can take all of that away.

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BRENDA BLAGG IS A COLUMNIST FOR NORTHWEST ARKANSAS MEDIA.

Opinion, Pages 7 on 10/24/2010

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