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David Nicholas: Sunshine Week is a national recognition of statewide Sunshine Laws, rules designed to shine a light on the importance of public records and open government. Michigan has several open meetings laws and adheres to the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, for the most part.
Currently, these kinds of transparency rules do not apply to the governor's office and state lawmakers. This makes Michigan one of the lowest ranking states in the country for state government transparency. Dave Clark is editor of the Midland Daily News, and he recently wrote about the lack of openness in our state legislature. He and I sat down to talk about it.
Dave Clark: Both Democrats and Republicans have had opportunities that they could have addressed this. They could have opened up their offices to FOIA, and they've refused to take up the charge.
The subject of my column, Matt Hall, in 2024, was very much for the idea of expanding FOIA and wrote a pretty passionate letter to the state Senate to try to get that moving. And then two years later, not only is he against it, he presented his own plan called HEAT, the Hall Ethics, Accountability, and Transparency Plan. Which, there’s a lot of good things in there. He's trying to get NDAs out of public contracts and limiting the time for lawmakers to go into lobbying and things like that. But ironically, he leaves FOIA out of this plan. And he's told us that he has no plan to take it up in the future.
DN: You say in your column that there were, quote, “unofficial tactics. Stuff that goes on again, or goes against, rather, the spirit of the law, but everyone knows it is happening.” Talk about that.
DC: So, when the governor doesn't have to adhere to these laws, when state lawmakers don't adhere to these laws, when the penalties for not releasing information that the public deserves under FOIA for not adhering to the standards set out in the Open Meetings Act, when the penalties for those are so low, they're really toothless laws. If the people making the most important decisions in the state are not subject to these laws, then everybody else who is subject to them takes them a little less seriously.
So, you get exorbitant estimates for records requests, and you get people who don't post meetings correctly so the public can attend on time. So, it really does have a trickle-down effect. And ultimately, the people that pay the price are the citizens of Michigan.
DN: There is another point that you refer to, Dave, in your reporting and in this column, and that is legal action when it comes specifically to things associated with the press. What can you tell us about that?
DC: Not only are we not talking about expanding FOIA, but State Rep Sarah Lightner from Springport is actually considering some legislation that would remove existing transparency. So, you know, for decades, newspapers have published public notices and legal ads from government so that people in the community will know about meetings, bidding processes, important, you know, functions of government, and this new legislation would seek to remove those.
And so, the result would be that you don't have the media sharing this information with the public, but it would be left up to the government to somehow share this information with the public.
DN: And that was Dave Clark, editor of the Midland Daily News. We talked about the rules and specifics around Sunshine Week at the end of last week.
