Robert Steinbuch, attorney and member of the Arkansas FOIA Task Force, joins Conduit News to discuss lessons learned from the Special Session. Steinbuch says moving forward, he believes that the FOI law will be a deciding factor in upcoming elections.
“Do we vote out certain elected officials, certain legislators who we think betrayed our principles of transparency? If we don’t know what government is doing, if we don’t know what government is spending our money on, then everything else is secondary. So to me, as someone who is a transparency advocate, admittedly so as someone who is a journalist, happily so, transparency is the right that precedes all of the others. So for me, if you were wrong on this issue, well, that’s a problem.”
Steinbuch also gives a brief update about a coalition that is now growing to get a constitutional amendment on the ballot to protect Arkansas’s sunshine law. To learn more about the group, AR Citizens for Transparency, click here.
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