Let the sun shine

Sunday begins Sunshine Week, a national effort to promote open government. You will see lots of stories in The Oklahoman about the topic, and we’ll be blogging about it as well.

Throughout the week we’ll try to address why openness is so important and some of the issues on the front lines of the current open records battles in the state and nation.

It’s easy for me to understand the importance of our state’s open records and open meetings acts because I couldn’t do my job without them, but it can be difficult for some to understand how it affects their daily lives. I think many of us take open government for granted, but we do so at our own peril.

Without openness laws, we would be entirely dependent upon what our government chose to tell us. Want to know how the city spends your sales tax? Interested in crime statistics in your neighborhood? Would you like to see how state officials spend taxpayer money when they travel? Openness laws make it possible to find out all of this and more.

Stay tuned throughout next week and feel free to chime in as we talk about open government.