Civics: The Death of University & Government Transparency in Texas
We soon confirmed that system leaders had been talking extensively. But many crucial messages that we knew existed were nowhere to be found. In one instance, we obtained a thread of texts among a few of the regents that referenced other messages between Abbott and Jay Graham, the vice chair of the board, about Harrison’s post. But our probe for those records yielded nothing. University staff told us that they could “only produce records that exist as of the date of the request.” It seemed that everyone involved had deleted their copies of the conversation.
Eventually, a top official with the Texas A&M system provided us with clarity; they said the regents, wary of public-information requests, were accustomed to using a work-around: “Read it and delete it.” Though destroying public records before the mandatory retention period expires can be a crime under state law, enforcement is rare, leaving officials free to routinely violate the foundation of the once robust Texas Public Information Act.
A generation ago, our lawmakers, journalists, and engaged citizens considered transparency and openness to be bedrock principles of our state’s government. Laws enacted in the seventies secured the public’s right to know how state officials wield their authority. For decades these laws had served as a point of state pride: Texas boasted of offering some of the most transparency-friendly rules in the United States. The TPIA spells out its foundational philosophy in the preamble: “The people insist on remaining informed so that they may retain control over the instruments they have created.”
These transparency laws led to revelations of some of the worst cases of malfeasance in the state. They also prompted the creation of regulations that have benefited taxpayers. After the Austin American-Statesman used over one hundred records requests to uncover more than 450 unreported child sex abuse incidents across Texas day care facilities, legislators passed a slate of new laws regulating the industry. And after the Houston Chronicle filed three hundred public-information requests and found that the Texas Education Agency had pushed districts not to identify students with disabilities, denying children services they were legally entitled to receive, the U.S. Department of Education took federal action, and the Legislature tightened its policies.
But over the past two decades, governmental bodies, with the help of the courts, have degraded Texas’s public-transparency apparatus piece by piece, nearly hollowing it out. Since January, I’ve filed more than a hundred records requests across nearly thirty state agencies—and in the process have seen how Texas’s open-government principles stand today. I was repeatedly denied, priced out, or strung along and often given records that were wholly redacted. In an era when trust in government and institutions has plummeted, the state is shutting out its own citizens.
