Despite the cloudy days, this week is Sunshine Week in Nevada and around the country.
It's a national initiative to promote the importance of open government and freedom of information.
In Southern Nevada, that means agencies like the ACLU, the Nevada Press Association and the Nevada Policy Research Institute are working together to push for better initiatives on transparency.
Rober Fellner is the transparency director of the Nevada Policy Research Institute. He told KNPR's State of Nevada that Nevada is at the "bottom of the pack" when it comes to transparency.
He said the state has a strong public records law that has actually been on the books for decades but there are no real penalties for breaking that law.
“Over the years, a culture has emerged among the governments that prefer secrecy to just defy the law and put the burden on the public to say, ‘just come sue us. We’ll appeal to the Supreme Court. So I hope you have three years of time and resources to fight a legal battle,’” he said.
He said other states like Florid and North Carolina both do a better job of being open and have penalties in place if those rules are broken.
Fellner said when a government agency refuses to turn over public records they give lots of different reasons from they don't believe the records are classified as public to reproducing the records is too much of a burden on public employees.
“The reasons are less important because they seem to be made up after the fact that an agency has determined they don’t want to make this information public,” Fellner said.
While most of the time we think about news organizations when we think about access to public records, Fellner said it is often regular citizens who are requesting the information but drop it when they get a letter back explaining why they can't have access to information they are entitled to have.
“The public records law isn’t supposed to apply to large organizations who have an attorney on retainer. It is supposed to help the individual citizens,” Fellner said.
He believes the best solution is to give Nevada's laws more teeth, but the only way to go about it is to either push for changes in the Legislature or take the issue directly to voters through a ballot measure.
Robert Fellner, transparency director, Nevada Policy Research Institute