CAP Sunshine

Advisory Board

Associate Members

Former Members

Project Information

About the Project

The goal of the Citizen Access Project is to allow citizens and public officials to better understand public access to local government information in all 50 states. Most of the funding for the project came from Orlando-based media executive Marion Brechner who established an endowment with a gift of $600,000.

The project director is Mark Caramanica, an attorney and current doctoral student at the University of Florida's College of Journalism & Communications.

The project's founding director is Bill Chamberlin, Joseph L. Brechner Eminent Scholar of Mass Communications emeritus and founding director of the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information at the University of Florida's College of Journalism & Communications. Chamberlin also led the development of a strong graduate curriculum in mass media law which included the creation of a doctoral degree plan, and joint degree MA/JD, Ph.D./JD degree programs.

Research Methodology

The project uses legal research to examine the individual statutory provisions controlling open meetings and open records in the 50 states, regardless of where the provisions are found in a state's statutory compilations. In addition, the project evaluates relevant state appellate court decisions and constitutional provisions. In some categories, we rate the statutes and constitutions before we have had a chance to rate related cases. We do not calculate a most recent statement of law score until we have reviewed all aspects of the state laws. We will not use a court decision for a "most recent statement of law" unless the court's jurisdiction covers the entire state. You can see which laws have been reviewed for each category by selecting the pertinent legal authority at the top of the "One category across all states" and "One state across available categories" pages.

The major research categories are definitions of a record, fees for copying records, procedures involved in requesting a record, computer records, the subject matter of records, the public and private entities covered under the state's records laws, constitutional provisions for access to records, policy statements in records statutes, and laws providing for appeals, remedies, and punishment in records cases. A similar list will be developed for open meetings.

Each state law access provision is rated by the MBCAP Sunshine Advisory Board (SAB) on a 7-point scale from laws that allow the most access to law that allow the least access. Once the ratings are received (see Advisory board below for more information about that process), they are coded by MBCAP graduate assistants, using an average of the ratings provided by the Advisory Board. The numbers on the web page are actually the average of the ratings of the Advisory Board times a weight we have given each legal authority. The SAB decided that it was important to give more weight to legal statements with more legal authority. Therefore, a rating of a legal statement from a state constitution is multiplied by a 9.6. A rating of the holding of the highest state court of a state (usually called a supreme court) decision is multiplied by 8.84. The weight for a state statute is 7.62. Other weights are 7.28 for a federal appellate court decision interpreting state law, 6.5 for a state appellate court decision below the highest court of the state, and a 5.38 for a federal trial court opinion interpreting state law. We are not yet rating the decisions of state administrative bodies with legal authority or state attorneys general. For the purpose of the weighting, the 7-1 scale is converted to a +3 to -3 scale so the multipliers will provide the appropriate emphasis. The weights mean that a statute rated a 7 by the Review Board will get less than a 7 when placed on our chart. However, the weighting accounts for the fact that a state constitutional provision carries more legal weight than does a state statute.

When we divide the ratings to fit the divisions specified by our 7 weather icons, we round to the closest whole number. We show you the real numbers we get (the SAB ratings times the legal authority weight) on the "One category across all states" page. Differences of a few decimal points between states should not be given significant weight since it may only mean that maybe one or two of our Review Board members gave one state a higher rating than another. Different experts on the subject might have voted differently. Therefore, the bigger the difference between state numbers the greater the significance.

Advisory Board

Professor Chamberlin, as director of the project, established the Sunshine Advisory Board to rate the state's access laws. Advisory Board members were chosen for their familiarity with access law, their commitment to open government, their individual credibility and visibility, and their willingness to work on the project. The advisory board members also represent different regions of the country and different professions and constituencies interested in access.

Once Professor Chamberlin and the MBCAP staff have prepared legal summaries of state laws, those summaries are sent to the Sunshine Advisory Board (SAB) for review. Every state access provision is sent to the board, one category at a time. When states use duplicate language, only one statement represents one or more states. However, the advisory board members are not told which state laws they are reviewing or, in fact, whether the statement of law they are reviewing is from a statute, constitutional provision, or court decision. The "blind review," which clearly cannot conceal all connections to specific laws from people who know the law well, is meant to limit the influence that advisory board members might inadvertently give to a specific state's law or a specific kind of legal authority.

The advisory board members rate each state law provision on a scale of 7 to 1, with a "seven" representing a state law that maximizes access to government information and a "one" representing a state law that most minimizes access. When the MBCAP staff receives the ratings from each SAB member, the ratings for each category for each state from each advisory board member are averaged. No member's votes are excluded. The precise average can be seen on the "One category across all states" pages and by putting the curser on the weather icon beside each category on the "One state across available categories" pages.

We only post the ratings when we receive votes from 8 of the 10, or 9 of the 11, active SAB members, depending how many members of the board we have at the time a vote is taken.

If a regular member of the board cannot vote, one of the "associate members" of the board are sent the statements of law being reviewed at that time. The associate board member selected will match the credentials of the regular board member as closely as possible. In other words, we try to substitute a media lawyer for a media lawyer and a media representative with a media representative.

Credits

Major consulting support for this project has been provided by Debbie Treise and Michael Weigold of the University of Florida's College of Journalism and Communications. Other major consultants include Shannon Martin of the University of Indiana; Robert L. Stevenson of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Melinda McAdams, David Carlson and Craig Lee of the University of Florida's College of Journalism and Communications.

Graduate and law students who have worked on this project include Joshua Azriel, Wes Brewer, Sherica Bryan, Michele Bush, Mark Caramanica, Irina Dmitrieva, Julia Farkas, Otilio Gonzales, Amanda Groover, Jane Inouye, Angela Jacobs, Deanna Kendall, Elenore Klingler, Seung Eun Lee, Jeff Mappen, Jasmine McNealy, Cristina Popescu, Samantha Powers, Amanda Reid, Amy Sanders, Barbara Smith, Ryan Stephens, Lisa Johnson Wallmeyer and Roxanne Watson, Kari Boston, Heather French, Nissa Laughner, Christina Locke, Ashley Poulter, Kearston Wesner, Christa Carter, Courtney Barclay, Abubakar Alhassan and Rosemarie Clouston.

Current key staff members are:

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