A government that operates in darkness operates without accountability.

Sunshine Week, an annual occasion when Pennsylvania’s newspapers and media outlets lobby lawmakers and the public for stronger protections for transparency and public access to how our government operates, is underway.

“Each year in March, news media organizations across the country take this time to highlight the importance of transparency in our government, and we underscore the vital work our journalists do to fight for access to records that shed light on government activity,” the website for the Pennsylvania News Media Association states.

For a society that prides itself on having an open, accountable government, progress on securing the transparency necessary for that accountability has been unfortunately underwhelming.

For instance, as William Bowman, editor of our neighboring newspapers the Danville News and the Daily Item of Sunbury notes in a column to mark this week, penalties for state agencies and municipal and county governments that withhold documents from the public are “essentially non-existent and hardly punitive.”

The process for requesting documents is too time-consuming and too costly, obstacles that hinder the public’s right to know what elected officials are doing.

We hope that our state and federal lawmakers will continue, with greater vigor, to improve laws to ensure the public knows what the government for which it pays is doing. An accountable and transparent government is the foundation for addressing every manner of policy which concerns our readers, fellow Pennsylvanians and fellow Americans.