Summary:
- Transparency and accountability are crucial to good local governance but require an engaged citizenry to maintain.
- Sunshine Week brings attention to the variety of tools people across the country have to keep an eye on their local governments.
- Here in North Carolina, public meetings and public record laws make it easy for you to see what your county or municipality is doing.
Government in a democratic republic is intended as a public institution where the people not only decide who gets to be in office, but also observe and scrutinize the activities of our elected officials. This basic idea is baked into the very foundations of the American system and even in the words themselves: the constitution guarantees every American a “republican form” of government, stemming from the Latin Res publica, meaning public thing.
These days, however, government transparency is never a given – particularly here in North Carolina. Throughout history, politicians have sought to hide their actions from the public for various reasons. Whether for purposes of official corruption, personal embarrassment, or simple convenience, many government officials frequently wish to keep certain of their actions, records, communications or other behaviors hidden from the public. In North Carolina, a variety of groups from across the political spectrum have increasingly called for greater political transparency in our state government in Raleigh. From Art Pope’s Republican John Locke Foundation to Democratic lawmakers in the General Assembly, the steady drift towards greater secrecy, darkness and contempt for the public by the leadership in our the state legislature has garnered widespread opposition.
In 2023’s state budget, government transparency took its biggest step backward in recent history. Tucked into the omnibus legislation were three major public records law changes, two of which further cloaked state government activities in darkness. While one change is positive – explicitly making site selection records subject to public records protections – the other changes allow public records to be buried or destroyed forever. According to The Assembly‘s analysis, “North Carolina lawmakers gave themselves the ability to sell, destroy, and disclose their legislative records as they see fit.”
The North Carolina Press Association was understandably shocked by the anti-transparency provisions in the budget, addressing legislators in a public letter with words of caution: “It is more critical than ever to protect and strengthen the right of citizens to access government records. We respectfully urge the North Carolina General Assembly to reconsider and rescind [these changes]. Instead, we encourage you to prioritize measures that enhance government transparency and accountability. Strengthening the right to access public records is not only in the best interest of the citizens of North Carolina but also crucial for maintaining trust in government institutions.”
Government transparency – or lack thereof – is often particularly a problem at the local level. While there exists a journalistic ecosystem of reporters and watchdogs at the national level looking for instances of corruption or shady dealing in Washington, there are fewer and fewer such investigators in our cities and small towns. Local news and journalism have been dying a slow death for a long time, and if anyone were still on staff to write the obituary, the effect of that decline on government accountability would feature prominently.
Luckily, there exists a variety of tools for everyday citizens that can help shine a light on the actions of local government. This week, March 16-22, we’re celebrating Sunshine Week, a national and bipartisan collaboration between non-profits, journalists, civic groups, and everyday citizens to raise awareness of these tools and the importance of citizens using them to increase accountability in governance. We use these tools constantly at Carolina Forward, but anyone – that means you – can use them as well.
These tools aren’t only for potentially rooting out scandal or corruption, but are also useful for gathering the information required to be an informed citizen and voter. For example, North Carolina has strong open meeting requirements for local government bodies, meaning that all meetings, barring some exceptions, must be open to the public, and the public must be provided with advanced notice.
This means that for the vast majority of your local government meetings, residents are legally entitled to go and watch. If you think you are uninformed about what is going on in your town or county, feel free to find out directly from the source. (Though some official deliberations, particularly dealing with employment issues, are often closed to the public for reasons of privacy, ultimate decisions are typically public.)
For all meetings and even closed meetings, governance bodies are required to keep notes, called minutes, which must be in the public record. Oftentimes, for bigger bodies like large city councils, those meetings will be recorded and posted online; but even for your most hyper-local body, if it’s a government body, it’s required to have some public record of its meetings, barring a few exceptions.
Beyond watching meetings and reading minutes, residents can also file requests for pertinent government records. Chapter 132 of our General Statutes lays out the guidelines, but generally speaking, local government bodies have to make public records available to you upon request, barring some exceptions, and cannot charge more than a nominal fee (for example, the cost to actually print the records). In practice, most sizable government entities have a procedure or email address on their website to request records; this is how we have found a lot of relevant data for our work.
There is an inverse relationship in America between the number of people watching government bodies and the number of bodies at each level of governance. There are lots of people watching the federal government, fewer watching the individual 50 states, even fewer watching any of our 100 counties in North Carolina, and even fewer still spread across the over 550 municipalities in our state. It’s incumbent not just on journalists but on every citizen to make sure that elected officials at every level are doing their job correctly and are under scrutiny. Sunshine Week is a good reminder of this duty we share and the tools at our disposal to carry it out.
