The Associated Press has reported that Seattle City Attorney Tom Carr will be chairing the 13-member Sunshine Commission that is charged with reviewing and modifying or eliminating exemptions to the state's public records law.

As an investigative reporter, I file a lot of public records requests. It's often how we are able to find out when officials aren't doing their jobs. I don't have anything against Carr, but he is known for supporting even obviously illegal city efforts to avoid disclosure. (He did not return a call for comment I made to his office on learning of the news late Friday.)

see follow-up post with his response

As a result Carr, in keeping with municipal bureaucrats' and elected officials' long-running resentment about having to provide the public with access to information under their control, has aided Mayor Greg Nickels in efforts to hamper public disclosure of documents.

The P-I has learned that Nickels lobbied Gregoire to appoint someone from the city, in a letter with a thinly veiled attack on open government.

The Nickels administration has been aggressive in attempting to use various exemptions to prevent release of routine documents.

The letter refers to balancing "privacy rights" with public disclosure, a common argument when officials are trying to hide emabarassing information and the same pretext the Bush administration used to withold from the public the identity of immigrants detained by Immigration officials in sweeps following 9/11.

Often considered the purview of reporters and other gadflies, the law requires government agencies to provide any citizen with access to documents. Since citizens are the boss of government, the theory is that we should be able to find out what is going on.

When the law passed as an initiative in the 1970s there were 10 exemptions. Now, according to Assistant Attorney General Tim Ford, there more than 300 exemptions.

Ford's boss, Attorney General Rob McKenna, was one of the driving forces in getting the law passed. McKenna has pushed for broader open records protections, seeing it as consistent with what he calls his Madisonian political philosophy.

While Carr is the chairman of the committee, most appointees - including those by Gregoire - are known to be pro-open-records. Carr, in fact, is a pretty good "representative" of the views of local government officials, and Greoire was required to appoint at least one local government "representative" to the panel.

Meanwhile, Ford declined to criticize Carr's appointment.

"I can work with anybody, and we're going to have productive meetings," he said.

Full disclosure: P-I associate published Ken Bunting was appointed to the committee by State Auditor Brian Sontag and is a board member of the Washington Coalition for Open Government.