Sunshine Week

Riverhead’s loss of meaningful Town Board minutes is not a minor change. It is a blow to open, accountable government — and to local history.

As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote more than a century ago, "Sunshine is the best disinfectant." Cronyism and corruption thrive in the cover of darkness. Our job is to open the blinds and let the sun shine in.

"[A] popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or perhaps, both,” James Madison, Father of our Constitution" warned.

According to academic studies of communities that lost their local newspapers, government became more inefficient, civic engagement and voter turnout declined and — get this — the cost of municipal borrowing went up. That’s what happens when the press isn’t around to fulfill its role as government watchdog.

The town needs a more comprehensive code of ethics as well as rules to govern the conduct of public officials presiding over adjudicatory hearings. These are steps that will institutionalize transparency and act as guardrails to protect the public interest.

It's hard to have confidence in the crime reports you compile when the information provided by police is inconsistent and incomplete.

Public notices are a basic building block of government transparency, yet an archaic state law mandates their publication in a medium that fewer and fewer people are using: print newspapers. The result is a big problem for government transparency.

By law, most government documents are public documents, accessible by the public, as they should be. Nevertheless, many government officials — especially the lawyers — behave as if national security is at stake and they work for the CIA. 

Local governments have come a long way in achieving transparency in public meetings, in large measure thanks to technological advances and the internet, but they've still got a long way to go.

After nearly 20 years of local news reporting, I could fill a book with stories of government officials trying to prevent reporters — and hence, the public — from finding out what they’re up to.