April 7, 2021 at 3:51 p.m.
Felzkowski should stop digging
Felzkowski should stop digging
It's a pretty straightforward and time-tested law: When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
For a long time now, Ms. Felzkowski has jumped down the transparency hole, working in myriad ways to close the proceedings of government to citizens. As the years go by, she digs her hole faster and more furiously - supporting the GOP effort to repeal the open records law (she was for it before she was against it), trying to shut down online court records, trying to increase costs for requesting records.
This year she has been busy trying to curb access to the minutes of government meetings by allowing certain local governments to bury them on their official websites, otherwise known as internet ghost towns.
And when we recently took the time to point out her ongoing efforts to cloak government in darkness, she decided to dig even deeper and to write a letter to the editor proclaiming how much of a fighter for open government she really is.
She is nothing of the sort. She is just the opposite, and the hypocrisy that passes for ink in her pen is highly offensive - and dangerous to democratic principles. Not to mention to conservative principles, for individual liberty cannot thrive when the collective actions of government are hidden from individual view.
The people must know what government officials are doing, if they are to self-govern.
To be sure, just like everyone else, Ms. Felzkowski is entitled to her opinion and her letter, but her letter is full of factual inaccuracies and distortions, and those must be pointed out.
First, she calls us out for spreading "misinformation" about her. We'll show that to be absurd in a moment, but the important point here is those who accuse others of spreading "misinformation" - mostly Democrats and corporate journalists and now Mary Felzkowski - are actually the primary purveyors of falsehoods and secrecy and censorship in America today. It's perfectly fine to point out inaccuracies and to disagree - that's what the American polity is all about - but, when one hurls the Scarlett letters of the day, one engages in baiting, much as Joe McCarthy red-baited every opponent of his by calling them a communist.
So beware the politician who alleges misinformation, for the next call is for censorship of that misinformation.
In her letter, Ms. Felzkowski hurries to proclaim she is "proud of my office's ability to fulfill every open records request we receive with haste and detail to the letter of the law ... ."
How nice, but that's easy to do when you have exempted yourself from the open records retention law, as the Legislature has done. Ms. Felzkowski could shred every document after she reads it and, so long as no request for them had been received, she will still have complied with the letter of the law.
A week later, when people do request the records, she can proudly uphold her "high standard" and legally say she has no records to give out.
Since she is a champion of openness with high standards, we're sure we'll see her soon join such lawmakers as Sen. Chris Larson and introduce legislation to end the records retention exemption. All of her constituents should write her and ask that she do so, and to fight publicly for it, such a champion of open government that she is. We'll keep you posted.
Of course, Ms. Felzkowski correctly points out we have never made an open records request to her office. Had we done so, she says, we would know she fulfills all her open records requests.
Perhaps, but Ms. Felzkowski deliberately misses the point. The point is, just because she keeps all her records and complies with requests doesn't mean the lawmaker next door does.
In addition, what records are important to keep are in the eyes of the beholder. We remember, when Jim Holperin was senator, he proclaimed he only threw away trivial emails, such as Girl Scout cookie sales, but in fact we found out he had thrown away substantive discussions with the DNR about shoreland zoning - records the DNR gave us precisely because they were under the records retention law.
So Ms. Felzkowski should just stop all the nonsense about how pure and pristine her office is and get to work making sure every lawmaker's office is equally pure and pristine.
As we have observed, Ms. Felzkowski is also a co-sponsor of legislation to end the requirement that city councils, village boards, county boards, school boards, and technical college districts publish their meeting minutes in the local newspaper.
Never mind that is where citizens go to read those meeting minutes, not to obscure government websites.
Critics say the minutes are often behind paywalls, but that's not true, either. When those minutes and legal notices appear in print, they also are added to the Wisconsin Newspaper Association's website, WisconsinPublicNotices.org, which the public can access for free.
For example, citizens can go to the website and, for free, read the minutes of Oneida county board meetings, just as they were published in the Northwoods River News .
Ms. Felzkowski doesn't want her constituents to have that access. She says it's too expensive for taxpayers, but let's examine that claim. In Trempealeau County, the board of supervisors spent $3,000 for legal notices this year, roughly 10 cents per county resident.
The Ripon Area School District spent $3,628 out of a $19.5 million budget, or 0.02% of the budget and 29 cents per resident. Fond du Lac schools spent $4,400 out of a $200 million budget, or 0.002% of the district budget at a cost of 10 cents per resident.
The minuscule cost is paid back a thousandfold and more in terms of being able to look into the workings of our government and hold officials accountable. In fact, maintaining broad access to those minutes will save taxpayers dollars by ensuring scrutiny and public participation, which minimize the risk of wasteful spending.
Ms. Felzkowski says she has "never advocated for raising open record fees," just that they be reasonable, and she has said newspapers should view those "reasonable" fees as the cost of doing business.
Of course, that she takes the time to continually bellyache that we need reasonable fees means she doesn't think fees are reasonable now, even though state agencies routinely try to discourage records requests with absurdly high location fees, sometimes in the thousands of dollars, and even though newspapers already pay tens of thousands of dollars every year for records.
To raise fees even more - putting access out of reach for average citizens - is inverted thinking showing just how much lawmakers miss that transparency should be considered a core function of democratic government. Somehow Ms. Felzkowski misses the fact that taxpayers have already paid reasonable fees for the core functions of government, otherwise known as their taxes, and open government, as well as the consequent waiving of fees in the public interest, should be seen by officials as the cost of doing the people's business, rather than the other way around.
Instead, Felzkowski wants to place the cost of openness on the backs of average people rather than on an $80 billion state government, where it would be, and is, a minuscule portion of the tab.
That's what is called having your priorities wrong.
Ms. Felzkowski says our criticism of her misguided support of the newspaper notification bill is just an attempt to protect the newspaper industry disguised as an open government criticism, but anyone who reads our past critiques knows our criticism travels the range of transparency issues.
Anyone who thinks the proceedings of government should be buried far from the people, away from digital media with wide followings; anyone who wants to increase the cost of records requests, which are already too high; anyone who would shut down access to online court records, which help citizens ensure public safety and judicial accountability, not to mention fairness for the accused; anyone who would not work hard to apply the same law to lawmakers that they apply to everyone else in government - such a politician is not to be trusted when it comes to transparency, no matter what they say.
And if they can't be trusted when it comes to transparency, they can't be trusted, period.
Indeed, Ms. Felzkowski should just fess up and admit she doesn't like the public looking over her shoulder and messing around in government business when she clearly knows better what's good for us, you know, like sending Northwoods dollars to fund corporate special-interest boondoggles in southern Wisconsin such as Foxconn.
With each passing year, Ms. Felzkowski digs ever deeper into the hole of government darkness, making it ever harder to shine a light on what is going on down there. It's time for her stop digging.
It's time for Mary Felzkowski to climb out of the hole and let the light shine on her.
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