And another thing, Sunshine

It's one of the biggest words in the English language. Apparently, it's also one of the most ambiguous.

"And" was in the middle of a dispute last week over whether a citizen should be charged for the time it took a public official to gather public records; in this case, the check registers of Coeur d'Alene's urban renewal agency, Lake City Development Corp.

The citizen and this newspaper took the position that "and" in Idaho Code 9-338 (8) means the citizen can be charged "a fee to recover the actual labor cost associated with locating AND copying documents if ... the actual labor associated with locating AND copying documents for a request exceeds two (2) person hours."

The "ands" in the preceding paragraph were capitalized and bolded by us for emphasis. In our view, the law is saying that the charges would apply only if the documents were located AND copied, as there is abundant law already on the books supporting paying the costs of copying documents. But that's not the way attorneys interpret it, so we'll move on.

This being Sunshine Week, however, we won't move on without making two suggestions in the name of openness in government.

The first is that there's a common sense, public-comes-first solution to unnecessary situations like this: Post all public records online. LCDC has already gone through the process of exhuming its check registers going back to 2003 and making photocopies of all those pages; why not invest another hour or two and generate goodwill rather than build what some of us perceive as stone walls? Post those records on the LCDC Web site.

The other suggestion plays off the first. LCDC bought some bad publicity for the $58.10 it wanted to charge the citizen. We think it's important to remember that nowhere in Idaho law does it say that governmental entities must charge for the effort and expense required to share the public's business with the public. Our legislators fully understood that part of any public official's job is to provide the public with information it needs and has a full right to access. As several of those entities have already discovered, posting public records online demonstrates unabashed cooperation with its citizens.

We maintain it also makes great economic sense. Posting public records online will save taxpayers money while improving the efficiency of agencies that would no longer need to engage in tedious research and copying efforts like LCDC did. They could then simply refer requests to the Web site that contains all the records that belonged to the public in the first place.