By Roy Ockert Jr.

During a recent appearance before a local civic club, two candidates for a state House of Representatives seat, one the incumbent and the other a former representative, argued against making Freedom of Information a part of the Arkansas Constitution. They said the people’s right to public records and meetings needs to be “tweaked” on occasion.

That’s exactly why freedom of information should be part of the Constitution.

Over the years since Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller signed Arkansas’s FOIA in 1967 as one of the first and best in the nation, legislators and sometimes state officials have consistently tinkered with it. They brag about favoring transparency, but too many of them would rather not be.

In the past year we’ve seen some rather dramatic examples as a few office-holders sense a weakening press, which has always been the primary defender of FOIA.

During the regular session of 2023 Rep. David Ray, R-Maumelle, and Sen. Breanne Davis, R-Russellville, sponsored House Bill 1726, which would have gutted the people’s right to public records, and making them more difficult, expensive and time-consuming to obtain.

In a committee hearing, when Ray denied that the proposed law would have cut off the right to most public records, law professor Robert Steinbuch of Little Rock, a FOIA expert, vehemently disagreed, saying, “There will be no documents.”

Fortunately, the uproar raised by citizens convinced the House Agencies and Governmental Affairs Committee to reject HB1726 by a 10-5 vote. It died when the Legislature adjourned.

The records section of FOIA has been successfully “tweaked” 46 times since 1967, sometimes for the better. Far more often, bad-faith efforts to weaken the law have been rejected.

Last June Attorney General Tim Griffin created what he called a bipartisan working group “intended to review and suggest modernizations” to FOIA. In doing so, he ignored the Task Force created by the Legislature in 2017 for that purpose.

That 9-member panel includes four representatives of news organizations. Previously, an informal FOIA Coalition, on which I served, fought for years against attempts to weaken the law.

But Griffin wanted his own group, which included Davis and Ray, along with two deputy attorneys general, one of whom helped try to pass HB1726. The other three included a Democratic senator (hence bipartisan), another attorney known as a FOIA expert and the executive director of the Arkansas Press Association but no members of the working press.

The “working group” would work behind closed doors, Griffin said.

His effort stirred some FOIA advocates to action, and Arkansas Citizens for Transparency was formed. It now has more than 2,000 members and has dedicated itself to protecting FOIA through people’s initiatives.

Proponents first had to defend another attempt to weaken FOIA, this one from Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, incensed when a blogger tried to find out who the governor was taking on taxpayer-funded trips.

Mind you, the blogger, Matt Campbell, a Little Rock attorney, was not asking for information in advance of trips but rather after the fact. The Arkansas State Police had already given him information about use of its planes, including tail numbers and times of departure, but redacted names of passengers. The ASP also refused to reveal the names of people who accompanied Sanders on a trip to Paris.

There was no security issue. The trips had been taken, the money spent.

Within days of a FOIA lawsuit filed by Campbell to get the names, the governor called a special legislative session. Senate Bill 7, with Rep. Ray again one of the principal sponsors was similar to HB1726. It would have added four major exemptions to the records section, closing not just the governor’s travel records but many others created by state officials, public agencies, boards and commissions.

Again the outcry in the first committee hearing was loud and broad — not just from news organizations but also from citizens, including Republican committees in Pulaski and Saline counties and the Arkansas Chapter of Americans for Prosperity.

SB7 proponents quickly backtracked and wound up passing a bill that only exempted travel records of the governor and other state officials — still another “tweak.”

At least that freed the leaders of Arkansas Citizens for Transparency to work on a proposed constitutional amendment and an accompanying initiated act. It took several efforts to get the ballot language for each past AG Griffin, and only after a lawsuit was filed did he give his stamp of approval.

The constitutional amendment is comparatively short, guaranteeing and defining the right of citizens to government transparency. It restricts the Legislature from constantly “tweaking” the law but allows an avenue for lawmakers to propose changes — with a two-thirds vote of each house and the approval of the voters at the next general election.

It also allows citizens to sue the state for failure to comply with the transparency law.

The initiated act spells out what’s required for transparency, but changes would require a vote of the people — not the whim of a governor or a group of legislators.

To get these two proposals on the ballot, Arkansas Citizens for Transparency must get the signatures of 90,704 citizens for the amendment and 72,563 for the initiated act by July 5. To help with the petition drive, go to www.arcitizens4transparency.org

The next column will summarize the initiated act.

Roy Ockert is a former editor of The Jonesboro Sun. He can be reached at royo@suddenlink.net.