The Durango Herald: Happy Sunshine Week, La Plata County.

No, this is not an acknowledgment of the early hints of spring or last week’s shift to daylight saving time, but perhaps something more thrilling: a celebration of open government and the public’s right to access government records.

“Public business is the public’s business,” reads the opening line of journalist Harold Cross’ 1953 book, “The People’s Right to Know,” which helped shape the intellectual foundation for the federal Freedom of Information Act and modern open-records laws.

While essays, court decisions and decades of policy debates have expounded on the importance of information access as a critical component of government accountability, Cross’ premise remains simple: The public has a right to know what its government is doing.

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