Sunshine Week: Document sleuth sheds light on St. Paul

It would be difficult to orchestrate a better kick-off to Sunshine Week – an annual event conceived to promote knowledge and use of open-records laws — than the closed-door super-secret session in the House of Representatives to vote on domestic spying legislation and immunity against prosecution for unknown crimes the telecoms may or may not have committed at the behest of the Bush administration. Or, for that matter, Minnesota Department of Administration Commissioner Dana Badgerow’s decree that local, county and state governments can deny requests for the contact information of citizen volunteers serving on government boards and commissions.

But it would be more difficult to celebrate Sunshine Week in a better fashion than St. Paul pseudonymous blogger Nemo de Monet, who has turned his weekly Freedom of Information Friday into a weeklong festival of public documents that have only recently been exposed to the light of day.

The first installment on de Monet’s blog, Entropic Memes, features an engineering firm’s report to the city of St. Paul evaluating the Lilydale Caves after three teenagers died of carbon monoxide poisoning inside the caves in 2004. The report was jointly requested by de Monet and the Twin Cities Urban Exploration Cabal under the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act, or MGDPA.

In an interview with the Minnesota Monitor, de Monet explains how and why he seeks transparency in government.

MM: Why are Sunshine Week and government transparency important to you?

NdM: Sunshine Week is a glorious celebration of this uniquely American idea that government should be accountable, and  transparent, to the people. You don’t have to know the right people, or have given money to the right people, to exercise this ability; anyone, by jumping through a few hoops, can become an inspector-general for a day, and see what it is their government has been up to. The less-noble aspect is the ability to acquire records — documents, images, whatever they might be — that were made at taxpayer expense, and in which at least some part of the public have an interest in, but which aren’t made public by the government itself, for whatever reason.

Continued: Click “Read more.”

MM: What are your plans for Sunshine Week?

NdM: Well, Gods willing, I’ll be publishing a variety of records acquired from government bodies through the use of open-records laws. The federal Freedom of Information Act is the best-known, and perhaps the best-designed — it’s been repeatedly revised to become more user-friendly over the years, and the vast majority of agencies to which it applies are well-trained on it and familiar with all the various nuances. Minnesota, of course, has the MGDPA — the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act — which is almost as user-friendly as the federal FOIA, but lacks some of the avenues of appeal and resolution that the federal law has.

MM: Is there more to these requests than discovering dirty little secrets?

NdM: One aspect of open-record legislation that I’m really interested in, but which nobody else seems to get too excited about, is the potential use of these laws to preserve interesting government records for posterity, especially at the state and local level. I know some people who have tried to get records from their cities from as recent as the late ’80s and early ’90s, and were told that the records in question — meeting notes and correspondence, I believe — either no longer exist, or can’t be found.  For the vast majority of day-to-day cruft that governments generate, that’s perhaps not a terrible fate — but more interesting stuff deserves to be preserved. Not for nothing do they warn about the perils of not heeding history, after all. If every blogger in Minnesota requested local records they, personally, were interested in — and posted them on the Internet, where nothing ever disappears for good — it would be a triumph for transparency in government — and for posterity, as well.