Don't jeopardize the public's right to know

Few laws are written so well that they adapt naturally to changing times while continuing to safeguard the public's right to transparent and accountable government. In Utah, the Government Records Access Management Act, better known as GRAMA, is such a law.

The worst thing state lawmakers could do this session would be to tinker with it in the mistaken notion that it does not adequately protect privacy or that it has not kept up with changing technologies. Above all, they should not change how the law respects the public's right to know what its leaders are doing.

As former House speaker Marty Stephens notes in his opinion piece elsewhere on this page, GRAMA was born after two years of regular meetings involving representatives of all entities that have an interest in public records, including the media and private citizens. The law that emerged was a consensus among those groups that has worked well ever since.

At the end of the last legislative session, a task force was appointed to review GRAMA. In the past year, that group undertook the thankless task of reviewing the little-known, but highly important, piece of law — and ended up with many excellent recommendations.

However, there were some proposals — some of which have already been removed; some of which still need to be addressed — that significantly weaken Utahns' access to government records.

We sincerely thank the task force for its yeoman efforts.

And we pointedly ask the Legislature to remove those portions that erode public access to government.

Because new versions of these bills seem to pop up daily, it's impossible for us to specifically address what is being proposed. We can, however, state emphatically that the people of Utah would be harmed by changes to a law that was carefully crafted to respect the proper relationship between a representative government and the people.

This matter is of such grave concern that the Deseret Morning News has taken the unprecedented step of joining with other daily and weekly newspapers and every major television and radio news station in the state — a group now known as the Utah Media Coalition — and hiring lobbyists Doug Foxley and Frank Pignanelli to help defeat these measures.