Feds need to tell the public what's happening in the territory it owns
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Someone damages federal land and is cited for it, but officials refuse to release information on the incident.
That's
hard to believe with all the talk today of government transparency and
the public's right to know, but that's what the U.S. Forest Service did
last week. An agency spokesman refused to give the names of miners or
the specifics of citations they received for building 800 feet of
illegal road on the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest west of Kerby.
He said doing so would be "an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy"
under the federal Privacy Act.
He told a Daily Courier reporter
the only way the newspaper could hope to obtain the desired information
is to file a written request under the Freedom of Information Act. The
Daily Courier will do this, even though the FOIA process is notoriously
slow.
It's incredible the Forest Service, and possibly other
agencies, think it's more important to protect the identities of those
who break the law than to tell the public what's happening on its land.
Oregon's congressional delegation needs to discuss the Privacy Act with the Forest Service and somehow ensure state residents are able to find out what's going on on their local national forests. The federal government manages more than half of the land in Oregon.
Let's hope the refusal to talk about the road-building, done next to the sensitive Days Gulch Botanical Area, isn't the start of a trend. In the past, crimes and other violations on federal land have been publicized. For example, the busts of marijuana grows on local federal land were in the news last year. More than 40,000 plants were seized in the national forest near Selma in August.
The Privacy Act is intended to limit the information the federal government can collect about people and what can be done with it. It's good in that it protects citizens against a Big Brother government and release of their sensitive information. However, it shouldn't be used to protect the identities of those who have misbehaved on federal land. At that point, the public's right to know outweighs the offenders' privacy.
Indeed, if the property damaged had been in Grants Pass, the information would have been made available by law enforcement without question or hesitation. That's because the state law they operate under, the Public Records Law, emphasizes the public's right to know. It's hard to imagine, say, police catching the driver who cut "cookies" all over a popular soccer field and then refusing to identify him or give other important details in a timely manner. It just wouldn't happen.
And it shouldn't happen when someone tears up 800 feet of ground on sensitive federal land.
Dennis Roler
