James Madison observed that for people to be free they need access to information.

"A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both," he wrote.

Unfortunately it seems Madison's vision is far from fulfilled. The Society of Professional Journalists, along with other open-government advocates, conducted a national freedom of information audit to see how easily people could obtain a particular public record. The audit results were released Sunday in connection with Sunshine Week, a celebration of open government.

For the audit, volunteers went to county offices across America seeking the federally required Comprehensive Emergency Response Plan. The plan, a requirement of the federal Right To Know Act, details how local government would handle an emergency involving hazardous materials and includes such things as lists of businesses that use hazardous materials, evacuation routes and other important information.

Nationally, only 44 percent of the requests for this public information were fulfilled. The others either denied the requests outright, edited the document heavily or just gave the auditors the wrong document. In many cases, the auditors, acting in their capacity as ordinary residents, were questioned why they wanted the documents.

Utah didn't do much better. Journalism students from Brigham Young University, under the direction of assistant professor Joel Campbell, went to 22 of Utah's 29 counties and asked for a copy of the emergency response plan. Eight of the 22 -- 36 percent -- provided the report in full. Those counties were Washington, Millard, Garfield, Iron, Piute, Wasatch, Sevier and Tooele, home of both the former Envirocare's radioactive waste dump and the military's Deseret Chemical Depot. Tooele County officials provided the report on a CD-ROM disk and were considered by auditors to be among the most helpful officials they dealt with.

Of the rest of Utah, all but two counties chose not to respond at all. One, Davis County, said that the record was protected and could not be released under state law, while Emery County, claimed its report was in draft form and not subject to public release.

Utah County was served with a public records request under the Government Records Access and Management Act to which officials did not officially respond. Under state law, failure to grant a request for a public record after 10 business days constitutes a denial.

Mark Burns, deputy Utah Attorney General, claimed that GRAMA itself declares the such plans are to be shielded from public disclosure because they have to do with emergencies, and that federal law allows GRAMA to trump the federal disclosure rules. If that's true, he should tell it to the eight counties that disagreed. Both federal law and GRAMA allow sensitive information to be segregated, with the public portions open to release.

Nationally, some of those who denied requests for the report said they did not want terrorists to obtain the information. However, keeping the public in the dark about how local government will respond to a disaster wouldn't seem to make people safer. The purpose of making the plan public is so that people can know what threats face their community and see that government has a realistic response plan in place.

By keeping the plan under wraps, the public has no way to judge whether their local government can adequately respond to a chemical spill at a factory or cope with a disaster that could release toxic materials. For all people know, the plan for their community was been drafted decades ago and is now obsolete.

After federal, state and local governments collectively botched the response to Hurricane Katrina, it became clear the public needed to evaluate emergency plans. The freedom of information audit is a canary in the coal mine. If bureaucrats are reluctant to release this public document, what other information is being wrongfully withheld from the peoplefi

Those who would push policies to keep the public in the dark, purportedly for safety's sake, would do well to remember that they work for the people, and have no right to deny access to records that are within the public domain. Such behavior is more appropriate in totalitarian regimes, not a country in which power flows from the people.

National security must be used carefully, not as a broad blanket. As Benjamin Franklin said, those who would trade a little liberty for temporary safety deserve neither.

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page A5.

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