March 16 was Freedom of Information Day, created by President Ronald Reagan in remembrance of James Madison’s birthday. It likely came and went unnoticed by most of us, but it’s on the calendar for an important reason.

Madison believed that a free society rests on the open dissemination of information between the government and its people. He wrote in 1822 that a “popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy.” It’s a reminder that Baltimore desperately needs to hear — perhaps more so than any other city in America.

Open records laws are the public’s most powerful tools for holding government accountable. My organization, Open the Books, uses them to file over 60,000 requests every year for payroll, contract spending, expenses and much more in every major city in America.

However, the law is useless if city officials refuse to provide the records they are legally obligated to produce.

Since January 2024, our auditors have filed 12 records requests with the City of Baltimore, eight with Baltimore City Public Schools and one with Morgan State University. Every single one has been ignored, denied or produced with so much missing information that it is essentially useless, except for two instances where we were directed to information already available online.

Four of the requests were denied based on an absurdly broad interpretation of the “personnel exemption” in the Maryland Public Information Act, which prevents the public from viewing the “application, a performance rating, or scholastic achievement information” of a city employee.

Baltimore records officials have construed the exemption to include seemingly any information about their employees, such as use of paid time off and paid administrative leave. Our auditors have even asked to view paid time off records with all names redacted, which was still denied.

The Baltimore Convention Center also used the personnel exemption to conceal the contract of Peggy Daidakis. She was somehow Baltimore’s highest-paid employee in 2023 despite retiring from her role as director in 2022. Taxpayers may never know why.

City agencies in Maryland are legally required to acknowledge receipt of records requests within 10 days and fulfill them in 30 days. Oftentimes, it takes multiple emails and voicemails just to get the city to acknowledge receipt within 100 days.

We requested a list of Baltimore’s take-home vehicles on Jan. 10, 2024. The Department of General Services told us they “did not recall seeing” our request until June, when they sent a list of 12 cars — not the 5,600 vehicles in the city’s fleet. We asked multiple times for the missing data, and we were ignored.

Our request for the contract of David Wilson, the president of Morgan State, was sent last July and never acknowledged.

The school district told us on March 5, 2024, that they needed an extra 30 days to send us a spreadsheet of travel expenses. It’s been over a year and we have yet to receive an update, despite multiple followup emails.

The transparency issues have continued this year. Our auditors asked the Baltimore school district for its 2024 payroll and were instead sent a link to the 2022 payroll. We had to ask again for current information and were told to wait until March.

The city Department of Finance refused to produce its credit card spending records unless we named the employees whose cards we wanted to inspect — as if it’s realistic to individually list every public employee in the city.

Open the Books has been leading the charge for transparency in Baltimore for years. We were the first to open the city’s 2023 checkbook, for example, a line-by-line accounting of its expenditures. It was concealed for an entire year and finally sent to us two days after our late founder publicly threatened to sue the city for withholding the information. But the fight for transparency isn’t over. There are several solutions Baltimore could implement immediately to fix its open records process, like creating an online request center comparable to most other large cities. Otherwise, Madison’s famous argument that democracy without information is “but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy” will continue to be borne out in Baltimore.

John Hart is the chief executive officer of Open the Books, the former communications director for U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn and a longtime Maryland resident.