Annoying, yes, but 'sunshine' makes a good democracy

If you've followed the Daily Herald very closely this week, you know that the Wheaton Warrenville school district is fighting in the state Supreme Court for the right to keep an administrator's contract hidden from the view of taxpayers.

But did you also know about a couple of other recent Illinois cases - such as when the village of Oak Park refused to release the names of companies or their bids on a proposal to privatize the town's streets operation or when the village of Melrose Park refused to release the amount of legal fees it paid to pursue a lawsuit.

These stories and others like them are interesting to contemplate during this so-called "Sunshine Week," a week during which news media and political activists encourage you to give thought to the importance of a government in which the governed have access to the procedures, meetings and documents by which the system operates.

The framers of democracy recognized the fundamental need for this kind of access in a self-governed society, but in practice, the people who find their way into office don't always respect it. Indeed, quite often, they find it annoying and inconvenient.

But let's be honest. Ruling in a democracy is annoying and inconvenient. It's supposed to be. We don't elect people to become kings and queens who dictate actions according to what they think our interests are. We elect people to govern with our support and consent, and we cannot give those if we don't know the details of the debates, facts and agreements that underlie the actions of government.

So, newspapers are naturally inclined to demand as much openness from government as possible. We see ourselves as the portal through which you can see and manage your government. If we can't get information, then you can't, and if you can't, then you cannot challenge your local school board over how much it paid someone to manage the day-to-day operations of the schools. You cannot challenge your county government over the way it lets contracts for roadwork, pays for health care or even hires office workers.

You may almost take such activities as these for granted as you monitor government from day to day, and you may not entirely appreciate their importance until - like one-time Wheaton-Warrenville school board candidate Mark Stern - you decide it's important to know some specific fact of government and find it closed off to you.

That may situation may not be as rare as you might guess. Nearly 1,000 Illinoisans turned to the attorney general's public access counselor for help in 2008, according to the attorney general's annual Sunshine Week report.

Because so many officials across Illinois either flout the laws or take advantage of loopholes that enable them to prolong stonewalling, the attorney general and government watchers are pressing lawmakers for stronger penalties for and prohibitions against withholding information. Had some of these provisions been in place in 2006, you might not be reading about Wheaton Warrenville this week - because the district would have been required to adhere to the attorney general's opinion at the time stating it should release its superintendent's contract.

Revolutionary firebrand Thomas Paine noted that even when officials want to govern well, "they mean to govern." "They promise to be good masters," he said, "but they mean to be masters."

In an age when the ever-accurate maxim "information is power" is even more pronounced, we all need to demand openness at all levels of government. For it's only through inconveniencing and sometimes annoying government officials that we, and not they, remain masters of our liberty.

• Jim Slusher is an assistant managing editor at the Daily Herald.