The Arizona Supreme Court yesterday agreed to review a lawsuit brought by the Goldwater Institute against the City of Phoenix, seeking records that the city has refused to turn over under the state’s public records laws. The case will mark the fourteenth time Goldwater has argued before its home state’s highest court.
Coming just days before Goldwater lawyers argue another important case before justices—one involving the rights to free speech and privacy—this new case, called Goldwater Institute v. Phoenix, involves the Arizona Public Records Act (the state’s version of the Freedom of Information Act). The Institute sought documents from the city concerning its labor negotiations with public sector unions—negotiations that produce contracts that often include illegal subsidies such as “release time” (which was the subject of still another case we won before the Supreme Court). But the city refused to turn over the documents, claiming the records could be kept from the public under the so-called “best interests of the state” exception—a judge-made rule that enables government entities to withhold information if they think turning over certain information would be bad for the “public interest.”
There’s a lot wrong with that. For one thing, the city failed to show that disclosing the documents would actually harm the public. Instead, the city’s witnesses simply claimed that disclosing the documents “may result in” the “politicization” of negotiations between the city and the union. That’s nonsense, since these negotiations are already inherently politicized. But even worse was the lower court’s conclusion that mere speculation like this was enough to shield the documents from public scrutiny. That’s not how the Public Records Act works: it was written to ensure government transparency, and only where it is clear that disclosing documents will harm the public, is the government entitled to withhold them.
The Goldwater case also seeks to clarify that when courts analyze public records issues, they must independently consider the interests at stake—including those of the public in knowing how the government is conducting its business and spending taxpayer money—regardless of any conclusions reached by the government or a lower court. Lawyers call this “de novo” review, and it’s important because it ensures that anyone who sues for access to public information has a level playing field at all stages in court. This issue will also be addressed by the Arizona Supreme Court in yet another public records case it agreed to hear yesterday, Abraham v. Arizona Board of Regents, which the Institute had urged the court to take up in a friend-of-the court brief.
Public records are absolutely crucial to ensuring that government remains accountable to the people. Public officials are the employees, not the bosses, of the public—and that means that unless serious security risks are present, the government shouldn’t be allowed to keep information hidden away. As the U.S. Supreme Court once said, the purpose of public records laws is “is to ensure an informed citizenry, vital to the functioning of a democratic society, needed to check against corruption and to hold the governors accountable to the governed.” We look forward to vindicating these values once more.
You can learn more about these public records issues on our blog and at our case page.
Timothy Sandefur is the Vice President for Legal Affairs at the Goldwater Institute’s Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation.
