Defeat and sorrow overshadow Sunshine Week in Michigan again

It’s Sunshine Week in Michigan. Again.  

The same show, different year. Years of optimism that an expanded Freedom of Information Act would clear the Legislature and be signed by the governor have been replaced by cynicism as supporters slowly become resigned to reality. 

The Legislature isn’t passing a real FOIA reform bill—not this year, not next year, not until a Watergate-like scandal hits and shakes politicians out of stagnation. 

Why would they? Why sign a bill into law and live with the results when you can pass the same bill year after year? When you can grab the headlines as a champion for open government year after year?  

That’s why nobody is celebrating Sunshine Week. Nobody is talking about it. It’s because celebrating Sunshine Week has become the birthday you’d just as soon forget. 

Instead of gifts, you get nothing but perfunctory platitudes — year after year. 

We know the story by now. Since 2016, one legislative chamber has teased us into thinking it will open the Michigan House, Senate and Governor’s Office to FOIA. 

Instead, reforms pass one chamber only to die in the other.  

No year is ever “the year.” It’s always somebody else’s fault.  

“It would have happened but for (fill in the blank).” 

For all the talk about more transparency in government, the hard truth is that everybody wants to run on transparency, but nobody in government wants to be transparent.  

We can start with candidate Gretchen Whitmer, who made expanding FOIA a priority when running for office. However, since her first State of the State in 2019, Whitmer hasn’t mentioned it again. 

It’s not just FOIA expansion, however. The House Democrats are putting their BRITE Act on the table for the second straight year. Bringing Reforms for Integrity, Transparency and Ethics  means requiring public officials to disclose their soft money accounts. There are no gifts for staff. There is one leadership PAC for one state legislator as opposed to three or four for the most aggressive legislators. 

The press conference for BRITE Tuesday featured more legislators on the podium than journalists covering it. 

Everybody knows the bills have no future. House Speaker Matt Hall came out with his own transparency plan that the House passed: a ban on no-disclosure agreements, a ban on lawmakers becoming lobbyists in other states and an end to the revolving door of legislators becoming lobbyists. 

He has his own acronym: HEAT — Hall Ethics, Accountability and Transparency. 

The bills are sitting in the Senate and won’t move. There’s no sign they ever will. 

FOIA expansion is sitting in the House and won’t move. Hall has said on more than one occasion that the bills are dead. 

Hall voted for basically the same thing a couple of terms ago. Now that he’s in a position of leadership and would theoretically have to administer an open records law, the speaker wants nothing to do it. 

Both chambers have made their political statements. They’ll leave the issue alone for two years when everyone has moved on to other topics and bring it back in 2027 as if it’s a brand-new idea. 

The only way we’re going to stop lawmakers from immediately becoming lobbyists after leaving office is through a statewide petition drive, and the only way we’re going to get expanded FOIA to apply to lawmakers or the governor is through a statewide petition drive. 

We’ll only get real reform through a detailed, specific citizen initiative. 

Don’t let the politicians write the rules like they did with that pitiful financial disclosure law they passed a few years ago. With the help of the secretary of state, lawmakers crafted a mildly functioning, feckless website that tells those who can navigate it next to nothing. 

Happy Sunshine Week. Political figures campaigning on initiatives for purely political gain with no hope of real reform. Defeat after defeat has led to nothing but sorrow. 

Pardon me if I pass on the champagne. 

(Kyle Melinn is the editor of the Capitol news service MIRS. You can email him at melinnky@gmail.com.)