Texas government is getting less transparent

Legislators need to shine the light

By Dallas Morning News Editorial

2:31 AM on Feb 16, 2023

Dallas Morning News

The Texas Public Information Act passed in 1973 enabled Texans to shine a light on government, from everyday business to corrupt dealing. But ever since its passage, the Texas Legislature and government officials have chipped away at the law with new exceptions.

During the pandemic, state and local government didn’t always provide stable ways for the public to hear meetings remotely. Public officials, meanwhile, relied on prior opinions from the attorney general’s office to deny public information requests, even when the requests and the prior opinions didn’t clearly align.

Public information requests are crucial to public access to information about local government, whether that’s zoning in a specific area or how money is being spent by a school district. But bureaucrats and politicians are too often devoted to skirting or undermining the law.

The Sunshine Coalition, an umbrella group including politically diverse public policy advocates from the Texas Public Policy Foundation to the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, is advocating for a number of bills this session that aim to strengthen open government.

That includes two bills filed by state Sen. Nathan Johnson, D-Dallas, that aim to restore the law’s intention and address new workarounds.

Senate Bill 618 would amend the TPIA to clarify the meaning of non-business days under the statute to address the failure of government bodies to respond timely to information requests. The law gives government agencies 10 business days to respond to a request, a timeline that is frequently abused or ignored.

While people who request public information and are either denied what they ask for or ignored altogether have always been able to file a complaint with the attorney general’s office, Johnson’s proposed law formalizes the process.

Meanwhile, loopholes continue to plague the law. In 2015, a legal decision saw many government contracts shielded from the public eye. In 2019, the Sunshine Coalition helped pass Senate Bill 943 in an effort to open contracts while protecting proprietary information. But some government bodies still found ways around it.

Johnson has now filed Senate Bill 680, which fine tunes definitions to clarify what contractual information must be released, including material matters like operating costs.

There are other bills filed this session that attempt to close other loopholes in the current code, and we urge the Legislature to evaluate their effectiveness and consider passing them.

The opening chapter of the TPIA states that Texans, in delegating their authority to public officials, do not give those officials the right to decide what is “good for people to know and what is not good for them to know.” These powerful words should not be forgotten.

Public records belong to Texans. Elected officials should remember that.

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Dallas Morning News Editorial. Dallas Morning News editorials are written by the paper's Editorial Board and serve as the voice and view of the paper. The board considers a broad range of topics and is overseen by the Editorial Page Editor.editorialboard@dallasnews.com@dmnopinion

Why Do Texas Republicans Still Oppose Medicaid Expansion?

Senator Nathan Johnson outside Texas Capitol

State Sen. Nathan Johnson, a Democrat from Dallas, has made Medicaid expansion in Texas a priority during his first term. None of his bills has succeeded, but he's determined to break through Republican opposition if he wins another term. Credit: Jordan Vonderhaar

This story is being co-published with The Texas Tribune.

by Kim Krisberg and David Leffler

November 7, 2022

One afternoon in April 2021, state Sen. Nathan Johnson sprinted through the Texas Capitol building, determined to reach the House chamber in time to see history made. For one of the few times since the Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010, the full Texas House was going to vote on a proposal to expand Medicaid, the program that provides health care to America’s poorest.An ongoing series on the 11 states that refuse to expand Medicaid. Read other project stories.Eighteen percent of Texans don’t have health insurance—the highest rate in the nation—and Johnson had already filed five pieces of legislation that session to use Medicaid expansion to get as many as 1.2 million of those people insured.To him, the approach made sense. The federal government would pick up 90% of the cost. Research showed that by rejecting Medicaid expansion, Texas was turning its back on more than $5 billion in federal money every year.All of Johnson’s bills were likely dead that session, doomed by opposition from Republicans whose hostility toward the Affordable Care Act goes back to 2013, when then-Gov. Rick Perry called it a “criminal act.” But as he ran to the House chamber that day, Johnson clung to a faint hope that this new effort would succeed. Nine Republicans had recently signed onto a House version of his last expansion bill, suggesting that cracks were forming in the GOP front.If Republicans were looking for a way to expand Medicaid on their own terms, this bare-bones amendment to a House budget bill could be it.

Read more at

Public Health Watch