Standard Examiner: House Bill 122 would allow government to keep secrets

Jesse Fruhwirth and Don Baker never met, but right now they have something in common.

Jesse is rolling his eyes over House Bill 122; Don is rolling over in his grave.

Before his death, Don was a leading investigative reporter for the Standard-Examiner and Deseret News, and a strong advocate for open government.

Together with former Republican House Speaker Marty Stephens, of Farr West, Don helped craft the state’s Government Records and Access Management Act in 1991.

Jesse is our court reporter in Davis County and has used GRAMA regularly in pursuing the public’s right to know.

Like Don before him, Jesse has been our point man on a number of GRAMA battles with law enforcement agencies that want to keep you in the dark about how they conduct your business.

Now the Legislature wants to thwart Don and Jesse’s efforts by gutting GRAMA with HB 122. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Douglas Aagard, R-Kaysville, basically will allow government to keep secret any document if officials believe there is pending litigation.

To use an argument that a lot of our lawmakers love, this is a slippery slope.

Jesse says if HB 122 had been in place when the Farmington police standoff with Brian Wood took place last year, the public might not know to this day that a police officer shot Wood.

Farmington police refused to make any public comment during the standoff. Neither neighbors, the media, the community nor the family had a good idea of what was going on.

“At the confusing and stressful conclusion to the standoff, an officer mistakenly relayed on his radio that the suspect had shot himself,” Jesse said.

“Without any input from police to correct the error, media took this small crumb of (mis)information they gleaned from their police scanners and unanimously reported it the next day.”

It was only because of GRAMA that Farmington police held a news conference the next day to tell the community that the suspect had not shot himself, but actually was shot by a deputy.

Farmington police had reason to anticipate litigation by the Wood family over the incident. An attorney representing the Wood family was one of those who joined the media in using GRAMA to ask for the complete file of the incident.

“Had HB 122 been in place during the Wood incident, would Farmington police have had any reason, incentive or interest in telling the public the truth about the incident? Would that press conference have occurred if the department knew that they were under no obligation to release any documents to anyone?” Jesse said.

Here’s the crux.

HB 122 will actually encourage more litigation because it will be the only means of getting such information. Jesse said the Wood case reveals why government agencies need to be required to release records “especially if there is the possibility of litigation.”

No one understood this better than Don. GRAMA was set up with the average citizen in mind, not necessarily the media. Creating another level of bureaucracy to prevent citizens from getting access to information they are entitled to is just another step in the wrong direction.

COMIC CHAOS: Some readers noticed that the captions for the Tuesday and Friday Family Circus comics seemed incomplete. Because of a “scripting error” in the pagination process by the company that puts together the comics page for us, the comic was automatically stretched by the computer to fit the space, rather than manually adjusted. This caused lines from the caption to drop off. The company assures us it won’t happen again.

Andy Howell is executive editor. He can be reached at 625-4210 or via ahowell@standard.net  .