For years, the city of Augusta and the Richmond County Sheriff’s Office have denied open records requests, and the latest ruse is the never-ending “investigation.”
When The Augusta Press launched, city leaders and Sheriff Richard Roundtree simply refused to acknowledge this organization as a legitimate media outlet and refused to comply with requests by passing the requests over to a “public information officer” whose job seemed to be to deny requests or ignore them totally.
Former Mayor Hardie Davis Jr. attempted to brand The Augusta Press as a “trashy blog,” speaking from the Augusta Commission dais.
When name calling did not work, the tactic switched to charging enormous amounts of money for heavily redacted documents.
Finally, it reached the point that we had to get the courts involved, and most of the lawsuits brought have been found in favor of The Augusta Press.
The government switched tactics again.
The law states that information can be exempted if an investigation is on-going; so, the government does not close “investigations.”
The investigation of a Burke County deputy who got into a verbal altercation with a Richmond County deputy has stretched on for nearly three months, and Fire Department officials want us to believe that, after over a month, no one in the agency has reviewed the toxicology records from the incident in May when a Fire Department supervisor ran over a deceased gunshot victim with his county owned vehicle.
This is not only unfair to the public, who have the right to know if sheriff’s deputies are illegally cuffing and arresting people and if Fire Department employees are driving their county-owned vehicles under the influence of drugs or alcohol; it is also not fair to the individuals involved, as the silence casts a pall of guilt when they may be innocent.
We contend that the public’s right to know is sacrosanct, and while the powers that be may believe The Augusta Press will give up and go away, as we say in the South, that dog won’t hunt.
We hope that the voters, come election time, will take into account that some elected officials would prefer they read Pravda rather than a free press, and will vote out the status quo.
