Commentary: Arkansas’ open records law turns 60 next year. Let’s give FOIA the birthday it deserves.

After Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller signed Arkansas’ Freedom of Information Act in 1967, the Arkansas Democrat newspaper ran the entire text of the law in its pages.

“Freedom of Information law secures rights of everyone, not just the press,” the headline proclaimed.

It’s a statement that’s been repeated often by transparency advocates, press groups and others ever since Rockefeller signed the law protecting the public’s access to meetings and records.

And it’s one that should be repeated even more often as the law approaches its 60th anniversary next year. Lawmakers should plan to give the Arkansas FOIA the celebration it deserves next year. Not with a party, parade or monument. Instead, they should celebrate the law by not tinkering with it. Or at least by showing extreme restraint if they wade into the issue once more.

The Arkansas Supreme Court offered the best guide on how to interpret the FOIA in the law’s first major legal test the year after it was enacted.

“We have no hesitation in asserting our conviction that the Freedom of Information Act was passed wholly in the public interest and is to be liberally interpreted to the end that its praiseworthy purposes may be achieved,” Justice George Rose Smith wrote in the court’s 1968 Laman v. McCord ruling.

Sunday marks the beginning of Sunshine Week, a national commemoration that focuses on the importance of the public’s access to records and open government. It’s a fitting time to look at the history of Arkansas’ FOI law, and ways to honor its legacy.

Legislators learned the hard way in 2023 that support for protecting the public’s access to taxpayer-funded records and meetings isn’t just a press issue when they took up Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ proposal to carve out new exemptions.

The original version of Sanders’ proposal would have shielded a broad range of records about Sanders’ administration, her travel and security from public view. 

Lawmakers backed off the broader exemptions after facing backlash from groups ranging from the Arkansas Press Association to local Republican committees. 

The law Sanders eventually signed still walls off some details about her travel and security. Though that change still keeps the public in the dark on aspects of how taxpayer dollars are spent, it fell far short of exemptions that threatened to create an even larger black hole in the FOIA.

Lawmakers last year appeared to have much less of an appetite for sparking the same kind of backlash, and instead approved a measure backed by transparency advocates that updated the definition of public meetings to include remote sessions. 

The best tribute to the Arkansas FOI next year would be to continue that trajectory. Arkansas’ transparency doesn’t need to be limited any further. If anything, it needs to be expanded.

Resisting the urge to scale back the FOI could be difficult, especially in today’s political climate. The sadly growing list of incidents of violence against political figures raises understandable security concerns on both sides of the aisle.

But those concerns can’t be used to dramatically scale back a law that’s been heralded as one of the best in the country. 

The 60th anniversary of the FOI’s signing should be a reminder to policymakers that any changes to the law need to be as narrow as possible. And they need to be weighed carefully, with input from press groups as well as the everyday citizens that the FOI ultimately serves.

The best way for lawmakers to celebrate the FOI’s birthday next year will be to keep a copy of that 1967 headline at their desks as a reminder the next time efforts to scale the law back are debated.