This is an opinion column.

John Cooper can cut deals that cost you – the people of Alabama – billions of dollars.

Literally billions, with a “B.” As in baloney. Or balderdash. Or boondoggle.

John Cooper runs a state agency, the Alabama Department of Transportation, that can take your land if it wants. It does it all the time. His conversations and decisions can affect everything from the amount of cash in your wallet and the length of your daily commute to the sanctity of the place you call home.

So, it’s important for us to know how he conducts his – I mean our – business.

Cooper, in a lawsuit over a Baldwin County bridge project, is fighting a judge’s ruling that would require him to produce documents, including text messages and emails, for a Baldwin County bridge company that sued him.

I have no idea if the suit itself has merit. I’m more concerned with Cooper’s response to it, as you should be.

For Cooper and his Balch & Bingham lawyers want to withhold text messages and emails he exchanged with Gov. Kay Ivey’s various chiefs of staff. He claims those writings are protected by executive privilege and are not your concern. If he is successful, government officials will be able – or will certainly try – to withhold important documents that reveal how and why decisions are made.

Despite the outrage and the irony of it all, Gov. Ivy supports Cooper’s action, and filed a friend-of-the-court motion with the Alabama Supreme Court to that effect. Just last week the governor was all about your right to transparent government. She signed an executive order requiring state agencies to at least respond to requests for public records, which was a start.

But this. This is a finish.

Let’s be clear. Open records laws in Alabama, and most of the rest of the country, for that matter, didn’t start because of media or idle curiosity. They didn’t come to be on a whim or with some gotcha intent.

They began because “government of the people” is more than a pretty phrase, because transparent government is a basic principle in this country and in Alabama. The state’s law, which gives every citizen a right to see “any public writing” that is not otherwise barred by statute, dates to 1923.

Open government is a basic, rather conservative and essential principle, and the writers of our law kept it vague on purpose. Because the presumption should be that everything a public official writes in the course of doing his or her job is your business.

Today’s emails and text messages are yesterday’s letters and notes. They are clearly meant to be public.

If Cooper is successful, every county commissioner and city council president, every chief of staff and department head across Alabama will claim executive privilege, and the result will cost us dearly.

Alabama has seen enough corruption to know. Whenever we allow government to wield its power in the dark, with backroom deals and anonymity, we end up with scandal and corruption from bankrupt sewer systems and cozy prison deals to private probation companies that prey on those who can least afford to pay.

It always costs us money. And trust.

There are reasons our government is not run as a business. The government can take your life or your freedom or your land. It can jail you for overdue bills, as the town of Valley does. Its representatives have protection from civil damages in most cases, thanks to qualified immunity. If a government-run hospital kills you, Alabama’s Supreme Court has held, your family deserves little if any compensation.

We grant our government remarkable powers. Secrecy should not be one of them.

John Archibald is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for AL.com.