According to a 2016 Post and Courier article tilled, “Secretive South Carolina Earns an F in Transparency,” the citizens of our state face “major hurdles in the pursuit of public information.” (1)
In fact, South Carolina earned an F grade in two of the most recent reports from the State Integrity Investigation for, specifically, “Public Access to Information.” As the 2015 report observed of South Carolina:
The law gives citizens access to information, but legislators not only find ways to work around releasing documents, but also discourage people from requesting them – either by charging exorbitant amounts or threatening to punish people who make “excessive” requests. (2)
If anything has changed since that report, it is not apparent in Aiken, where City officials recently began charging local independent researcher and writer, Don Moniak, exorbitant amounts during the course of his investigation into Project Pascalis. It was the City’s $48/hour charge for “Economic Development Hours” — quite a departure from the customary $16/hourly rate they’d been charging him for FOIA requests — that drove one recent invoice to a total of $480.50 and another to $525.50.
Going forward, concerned citizens are encouraged to learn more about FOIA laws and openness in local government offices. Public participation is integral to openness. That old rule about sunshine being the best disinfectant against secrecy, ethics violations and corruption is still true.
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