OUR VIEW: Open the books, let the people read
Searching utahsright.com, you can find your favorite professor’s salary, the amount of contributions your neighbor made to the Mitt Romney campaign, your girlfriend’s divorce records and the sex offender living right next door.
The information available to the public on this Web site may seem an infringement of privacy but much of it is pertinent to public safety. Try it. Enter your zip code on the Web site. Instantly, a detailed map of your neighborhood pops up showing the registered sex offenders in your area. While the site wasn’t created to inflict fear, the results of most searches are not comforting. However, knowledge is key to safety and even upon learning that the friendly neighbor down the street has a history of sexual assault, it is better to be in the know.
Spend a minute on utahsright.com and the shameful salaries given to public school teachers becomes obvious. Utahsright.com breaks salaries down to hourly and annual figures, and for educators, these numbers aren’t pretty either.
People can be well informed on just about everything with an interactive site like this. There are discussion forums where people can post their thoughts on district court charges, political contributions, public salaries, etc. The site generates the public involvement needed to ensure honest and fair government rule.
Unlike the days when information was only available through Freedom of Information Act, facts and figures like these are at anyone’s fingertips. Information is instant. As long as the available facts are used for the good of society and the protection of lives, we can be grateful for unreserved publication of information. Citizens and the press are entrusted with a duty to act as true watchdogs.
The citizens of Utah are fortunate to have such access to information. The United States government should take some tips from this site and open more of its records to the country. In the last seven years, the U.S. has adopted a policy of maintaining absolute secrecy. And, as now realized by many, that is not always the best approach. No one can really know what the government it doing when its actions are kept so tightly in secrecy. Fortunately, Utahns can keep tabs on the state government and those in control. It is easier to trust in public officials when information is recorded and readily available to their constituents.
It really is too bad the Freedom of Information Act doesn’t apply to the President himself.