Federal and various state Freedom of Information Acts should be expanded, not diminished, as has often been the practice over the years. Such statutes are especially valuable in uncovering and tracking complex inter-governmental activities. That has been my experience in monitoring water quality issues. For example:
Several years ago, I had occasion on behalf of Sierra Club to investigate the NPDES violations of a large Midwestern wastewater treatment plant, its unexplained phosphorus overloading in particular.
By applying FOIA triangulation, the deceit of a plant manager in manipulating data was uncovered. I had found through initial, routine FOIA requests that two people at the plant depended on the same data for separate reports, each to state and federal regulators.
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| Wastewater Treatment Plant |
I made further FOIA inquiries to the state and federal offices. Apparently, each month the regulators duly filed away the two municipal reports, ostensibly based on the same data, without the comprehensive review and/or comparative analysis that would have revealed the variations in the underlying data.
(Once exposed, the offending manager was returned to his previous post in a different department at the same plant. As a result of improvements in the treatment process, the phosphorus numbers eventually improved.)
The value of broadly applicable government transparency statutes is immeasurable. All of us should press for better access to government records through enhanced freedom of information legislation.
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