Oxnard Union High School District offers the latest example of the importance of Sunshine Week, which begins today and runs through Saturday.

Sunshine Week goes to the heart of good governance: openness and the public's right to know what their elected officials do on their behalf. Too often, though, elected officials prefer to conduct business in secret. In many cases, information is withheld to prevent embarrassment or to keep actions hidden that might point out elected officials' stupidity.

Usually, government keeps documents hidden by falsely claiming they are not public information.

That is what the Oxnard Union High School District did when The Star sought to find out how much money it had spent on legal fees to fight a wrongful-termination lawsuit.

Such fees, a school district lawyer said, were not public information.

A Superior Court judge disagreed after The Star went to court to argue these were public records.

That ruling now becomes precedent and such legal fees become part of the public record, available for all to see.

Efforts to open up government come at many levels. California has the Brown Act — recently expanded and added to the state constitution — which governs open meetings at the local level, and the Bagley-Keene Act, which applies to state agencies.

But the effort to open government is a continuing struggle. On the last day of 2007, President Bush, signed the Freedom of Information Act reform bill. That bill would have created an Office of Government Information Services to help people appeal adverse decisions without going to court.

Yet, Mr. Bush's proposed budget, which was not released until after he'd signed the FOIA reform bill, would strike the section that created that office and instead shift the task of mediating FOIA disputes to the Justice Department, the same agency that represents government departments and agencies in those same disputes. It would become, in essence, the prosecutor, the defender and the judge in FOIA litigation.

This being an election year, the Sunshine Alliance, which helps coordinate Sunshine Week activities, has begun a yearlong Sunshine Campaign project. It is designed to make discussion of open-government issues part of election campaigns — from the office of the president of the United states to the city council.

Its intent is not merely to spur conversation about open government, but to have candidates for office commit to achieving it.

Though Sunshine week lasts through Saturday, the Sunshine Campaign will last all year long, and fighting to keep government operating in the open is a year-round task.

You have the right to know what your government is doing and has done. If this First Amendment right to know is weakened in any way, nothing less than democracy is threatened.