The public’s right to know what its government is planning, doing, or even contemplating, is never more important than during times of crisis.
Nearly four decades of local journalism in Ohio has taught me that fact.
It comes from covering simple things like a Guernsey County commissioners’ meeting to something far more complicated — a public meetings/records fight with a local hospital association in Fostoria that required two trips to the Ohio Supreme Court and a legislative fix to a law that had been unknowingly altered in an omnibus budget bill.
My immersion into the topic became complete when my publisher in Fostoria, a man who owned a 7,000-circulation newspaper, tossed a “legal brief” several hundred pages thonick my desk and said he wanted to start a 10-part series on the Supreme Court litigation in the next day’s edition.
I learned enough about Ohio Revised Code 121.22 and 149.43 to recite them in my sleep — even as my small-town publisher spent more than $100,000 to win a battle that won him no friends in the community and almost certainly cost him advertising revenue.
The basics are simple. Under state law, citizens have a right to attend all public meetings and examine public records. Those laws apply even during things like the COVID-19 pandemic that has struck the nation.
Certainly there are exceptions, a list that has grown increasingly too long over the years as state lawmakers find ways and reasons to make it more difficult. The public meetings law has been amended nine times in just the last decade.
MEETINGS IN PANDEMIC: The state legislature recently relaxed the “in-person” portion of the meetings law, allowing public bodies like county commissioners, city councils and school boards to conduct “virtual meetings,” using online technology.
Even then, those entities must provide public access, through live audio, video or both.
That’s why a recent Mansfield City Council meeting was delayed for 48 hours. A technology issue prevented the “live stream” of the event to be available to the public. Council members recognized that fact and shut it down before the meeting started.
It’s true the vast majority of the residents cannot attend, or choose not to attend, public meetings. They don’t have the time, nor the interest, to dig into public records.
Residents have relied on news reporters to do this on their behalf since this democratic experiment began more than two centuries ago. That’s what we get paid to do — and it’s one of the reasons (shameless plug time) we encourage you to become a member of Richland Source.
We provide local news for free at Richland Source. The effort to obtain that news costs money (end shameless plug).
That public right to know is why I was happy to see some reporters in Columbus begin to press harder for answers from Gov. Mike DeWine and health director Dr. Amy Acton regarding COVID-19 numbers in nursing homes.
Decisions are being made by elected and appointed officials that affect lives of residents during this pandemic. Those residents have a right to know what goes into those decisions — and the impact of those decisions.
PROTESTING TO PROTECT RIGHTS: Those same residents have a right to protest government decisions, a tradition that dates to the origins of this nation. We have thrown tea in the harbor, protested in Washington, D.C. during times of war, and marched in the South to protect voting rights.
The country’s founders believed in the public’s right to protest so much they included it in the 1st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
Obviously, gathering in crowds to protest during a pandemic is something citizens should carefully plan and consider.
But at least heading into Saturday’s protest in Columbus, there is a reason you have seen no protesters at the state capital fined, arrested or jailed, even as they seemingly violate government’s stay-at-home order.
I doubt the government would win such a legal challenge. The rights found in that 1st Amendment are “fundamental,” enumerated specifically in the Constitution.
If a right has been determined to be “fundamental” then a court applies “strict scrutiny” to a government restriction.
Under strict scrutiny, there must be both a compelling governmental interest to deprive the right. Also, the deprivation must be narrowly tailored and the least restrictive means of furthering the compelling governmental interest.
Under strict scrutiny, the government has the burden of proof to demonstrate these things. A court would likely find the state has failed to meet that burden in this case of protesters gathering in Columbus.
(Richland Source City Editor began his journalism career at the Cambridge Daily Jeffersonian in 1979 while a student at Ohio University. We question if he can really recite the Ohio public records law in his sleep, but there’s no test available for that either.)
