It’s Sunshine Week, the annual celebration of access to public information, this year coordinated by the Joseph L. Brechner Freedom of Information Project at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. To commemorate the power of public information, we’ve asked experts to share their tips for requesting open records and responding when facing roadblocks to access.
Joan Meiners, PhD, climate news and storytelling reporter at The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com, offered advice on accessing open records on the environmental beat.
What’s your process for identifying stories or investigations where you believe the public deserves some sunlight?
Meiners: Even with general awareness of climate issues rising by the minute, I still find there are many ways society functions where climate change has simply not been a sincere part of the conversation around best practices, protocols, plans, etc. This makes for a landscape ripe with climate and environment stories everywhere you look, if you’re viewing things through that lens where others have not.
One example is building practices. I recently published a series on the intersection of the housing crisis and the climate crisis across Arizona. With deadly heat extremes on the rise, we are literally constructing the survivability of our future when we decide, as a community, to approve certain developments or building regulations. Will these homes be safe to live in with rising temperatures and energy grid instability affecting air conditioning functionality? Are we being mindful of emissions generated in the course of sanctioned building practices that will make the climate problem worse even as they solve the housing problem?
This is just one example of how I try to approach the intersectional dynamics of climate and environment reporting to help people think about real, local problems in a deeper way than, I think, study stories or more straightforward reporting on climate impacts can (though those are also important!).
What are three examples of environmental data or other government records that journalists might not think to request?
Meiners: My most recent climate accountability story came about because I read a colleague’s story about the city of Phoenix canceling plans for a homeless shelter when they found contamination at the site. I was interested in seeing more detail about what types of chemicals and levels were found, so I actually just reached out to that reporter and asked if she’d be willing to share the site report she’d already received from the city. In it, I found evidence of alarming levels of methane that just hadn’t stood out as a climate problem to anyone who had previously looked at the document. I ended up collaborating with the reporter who worked on the homeless shelter site story to co-byline another story about why Phoenix, supposedly a climate-forward city, had completely ignored very problematic levels of methane contamination at this site, saying it was not an issue because they had opted not to build there (that’s not how climate consequences from this greenhouse gas work).
The moral of this tale is just that you can find the ingredients for climate stories everywhere, even in already-published stories, if you know what you’re looking for and are looking at a situation through a climate lens that maybe was not the focus of the original reporting. (Story here.)
Second, there are a lot of government documents that are supposed to be posted online when they are referenced in public meetings, for example, that never end up getting uploaded. Sometimes this just means someone dropped the ball, but other times it can mean there’s something there they’d rather not make public. Every time you attend a public meeting and a document is mentioned, write down its name. If you end up having questions related to what you think should be in that document but it never got posted, ask for it. I’ve had those records shine some light on how well a government entity is handling an issue that feels at odds with how they talked about it.
Third, I’ve had some fun requesting attendance records for public officials at committee meetings, etc. It makes the elected officials and their aides uncomfortable (as it should!) and can sometimes become a story about who is really doing or avoiding the work on different issues.
Especially given your scientific background, what do you look for first when you receive the information you requested?
Meiners: I’m still a science nerd at heart. So I like details and numbers and looking for things that don’t make scientific sense or that might not have stood out to others right away. If you have an unusual area of expertise, make sure you’re putting on that hat when you look for stories. This is how I ended up reporting on Phoenix officials ignoring high levels of methane emissions at a plot of land they own and had tested. The environmental report for that site had passed through the hands of dozens of city employees, engineers and even other reporters without anyone flagging the 420,000 ppmv soil gas sample CH4 levels.
When I asked them why they didn’t have people on staff who understood the climate impacts of this amount of methane, they tried to gaslight me, telling me it was not an issue for the climate! But I knew it was, and I had read research papers and talked to experts who confirmed it was!
So, knowing what you’re talking about and then standing firm on that can sometimes turn into a great story no one else would have found that can make a meaningful difference — by the time I published that story, the city was working on hiring a contractor to deal with the methane emissions that they only weeks before had tried to tell me were not a concern. In other ways, I think my ecology background is constantly coming into play, influencing my thinking about how seemingly disparate aspects of the natural world are actually connected, which has helped me have relatively original takes on what others view to be more isolated scientific findings.
What are the biggest access issues you have faced when seeking information and how did you overcome these obstacles?
Meiners: When I was reporting on water insecurity and other environmental issues in rural southwestern Utah (with Report for America), I often needed to request responses from the Bureau of Land Management. But the local office had just one PIO who controlled all the communications. He liked to ignore my emails and then, when I’d text to follow up, he’d tell me he was about to head to the gym and would get back to me later, or something like that (in the middle of a week day). It actually seemed like he was on a power trip about denying me access.
So we started working on stories about how the local BLM office was uncommunicative and it was impossible to know what they were doing or hold them accountable for anything. His response time got a bit better after that. Similarly, in that position, I discovered that some local public meetings did not have audio recordings because the city had flawed equipment and so had just stopped trying to record them. When I pushed them on this, they seemed to think that not having functional recording equipment was a legitimate excuse to not have records of public meetings. Sometimes you have to remind the public officials – with firm language and links to laws — about their records obligations.
Could you share some examples of accountability journalism you’re most proud of publishing in recent years?
Meiners:
- Phoenix touts climate awareness, but hasn’t addressed methane levels at city-owned site (co-bylined story mentioned above)
- In Yuma, farmworkers’ struggle with heat is worsened by inadequate housing (exposes failed efforts in the city of Yuma to develop housing that would protect local agricultural workers from extreme heat impacts)
- Nobody in Arizona seems to know what’s happening with Joe Biden’s Climate Corps (still the only story I’ve seen nationally calling out Biden’s “American Climate Corps” program for having zero teeth or progress so far)
- More homes mean more heat. Can new building codes help save metro Phoenix from disaster? (includes details on greenwashing of building practices by cities who claim to be sustainability-focused in their development but then send lobbyists, etc. to fight efforts to build in greener ways)
- Water, climate, environmental justice: Bills to watch at the Arizona Legislature in 2024 (previews introduced bills and includes my tally of how similar bills fared last year (showing that AZ has not passed any meaningful environmental legislation recently)
- As the Supreme Court debates a Navajo water rights case, climate change adds new questions (highlights how Indigenous communities have been cheated out of water access in Arizona)