Sign Here and Here (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

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It took several tweaks and one lawsuit, but Attorney General Tim Griffin has now approved the language for an initiated act and a constitutional amendment protecting Arkansans’ right to know what their government knows. I’m using this space to ask you to make a special effort to sign petitions to put both on the general election ballot in November.

Both of these ballot items are the work of a group of strange bedfellows called Arkansas Citizens for Transparency, which reflects the importance that Arkansans across the political spectrum place on preserving and protecting our Freedom of Information Act. Arkansas’ FOIA, signed by Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller in 1967, is one of the most robust in the country, despite decades of chipping away at it by legislators. I have heard and participated in significant grousing about new exemptions over the years, but I never heard anyone even float the idea that the FOIA needed constitutional protection until 2023.

That, of course, was the year when Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Gen. Griffin’s paid campaign consultant, state Rep. David Ray, R-Maumelle, tried twice to take a Ginsu knife to the FOIA. The reasons given for creating more state secrets ranged from laughably misleading (that we needed our FOIA to be more like the demonstrably inferior laws of other states) to cynically self-serving (that the governor’s family would be in danger in the future if taxpayers knew how much was spent on her travel in the past).

The first attempt, in the regular legislative session, ran into a brick wall of citizen opposition from left and right. Undeterred by the clearly expressed will of the people, Sanders managed to get a fraction of the relief from accountability that she sought in an unnecessary special session (its other topics being distinctly non-urgent). She immediately made it clear she wasn’t done making our government less transparent.

So Arkansas Citizens for Transparency sprang into action and drafted a constitutional amendment protecting the right to government records and an initiated act that would undo recent damage to the existing FOIA and clean up some vague language. Neither will be on the ballot in November without enough signatures — more than 90,000 for the amendment, more than 72,000 for the initiated act.

I’m asking you to sign both so we have a chance to vote for both.

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My husband, Rob Moritz, was appointed by Sen. Jonathan Dismang, then president pro tempore of the Arkansas Senate, as an original member of the FOIA Task Force that the Legislature created in 2017. Rob is now chairman of that Task Force, which has the job of making recommendations on proposed changes in the FOIA. Attorney General Griffin gets upset when Arkansas Business mentions the Freedom of Information Act but fails to specifically disclose that my husband and I are both on the side of transparency and accountability.

Email Gwen Moritz, interim editor of Arkansas Business, at gmoritz@abpg.com