Wisconsin’s Gov. Jim Doyle is slow and his spokesman is snarky

The Capital Times has filed a lawsuit alleging that Gov. Jim Doyle violated Wisconsin’s sunshine law by undue slowness in responding to a request from the newspaper.

The governor needed to appoint judges to three vacancies in Dane County. There were nine finalists. Letters were written to the governor about those finalists. The newspaper wanted to see copies of the letters, and copies of questionnaires each finalist completed. The request was made on June 4.

The governor did not hand over the records until July 8, five weeks later. Not to mention — what are the odds? — the records were finally handed over 90 minutes before Gov. Doyle sent out a series of three press releases announcing his appointments. So I guess the Gov’s office wanted to make sure that no one in the press or the public had a chance to get involved in the dialogue around the judicial vacancies.

Or as Paul Fanlund, editor of The Capital Times, puts it:

“The governor’s office clearly delayed release of these records until moments before announcing the appointments in a calculated attempt to prevent a story I don’t know how a reasonable person could interpret it otherwise.”

Lee Sensenbrenner, enjoying the hubris of power along with a stable and generous tax-funded salary as the governor’s spokesman, engaged in what bloggers refer to as snark when he heard about the lawsuit, indicating that he was surprised that the newspaper had the resources to file a lawsuit.

Nice.

Wisconsin’s sunshine law doesn’t have a legally defined response time. 35 state sunshine laws do, and 15 don’t. That’s a reason to fix the Wisconsin law. Even though the law doesn’t have a mandated response time, it still requires state agencies to produce records in a timely manner.

See also:

Gov. Doyle’s office not enamored with Freedom of Information.

Kudos to Anderson County, South Carolina

County officials of Anderson County, South Carolina recently decided to add to its website every item recommended by Sunshine Review for county-level transparency, earning them an A+.

A spokeman for South Carolina’s comptroller said, “I’m just floored at what they’ve done and are doing. I don’t know how it’s escaped our notice. This Web site by far makes Anderson far and away the best in the state, the most transparent in the state.”

Information the county has added to its website in the last two months includes:

* Information about contracts with the county before and while bids are open.
* A search function for five years of county council meetings.
* A link to make it easy to fill out a South Carolina Freedom of Information Act request.
* Its checkbook register

A FOIA request was filled out within hours of the county adding that function to the website.

Here’s the overall evaluation of South Carolina county websites.

There are 45 other counties in the state.

Caputo: Preserve those records!!

Here’s hoping that federal district judge Richard Caputo will agree with a request from plaintiffs’ attorneys that records of over 6,500 juvenile defendants will be preserved.

The case has to do with about 6,500 juvenile defendants whose cases were shepherded through Pennsylvania courts from 2003-2008 by judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan. Federal prosecutors say these judges were corrupt, having taken $2.6 million in payola in exchange for sentencing the children to private prisons.

Last month, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court said it would be okay to destroy the records of the approximately 6,100 youngsters who have not (so far) filed a lawsuit against the counties where the judges committed these corrupt acts. (There is no dispute about the records of the 400 young people who have filed a lawsuit.)

Luzerne County is being sued. An attorney for the county told federal judge Caputo that he would be “stepping on the toes of the state court” if he acted in his capacity as a federal judge to order the records preserved.

Huh. This is a county with a court system that would seem to need someone to step on its toes. Keep those records!

Football and third party custodians

A consortium of news organizations in Florida are suing the NCAA under Florida’s Sunshine Law because the NCAA won’t give them the records that have been requested.

Background: The NCAA sanctioned Florida State University. The NCAA’s infraction committee said 14 wins that had been chalked up to FSU football coach Bobby Bowden should be overturned because some of the players who played in those games were later found to have been involved in academic cheating.

I’m not yet clear on what the legal basis is for saying that the NCAA (which is not a Florida state agency) should have to comply with Florida’s law.

Different claims that might be made:

Although the NCAA is nominally private, it is partially or mostly funded with public dollars.

The records really belong to FSU and are only in the temporary keeping of the NCAA. This is the “third party custodian” line of thought. In 1990, a Florida appellate court said that St. Petersburg couldn’t avoid complying with the state’s law by handing its records over to an outside attorney.

If the records belong to FSU, or were created by FSU and tendered to the NCAA, this line of thought would be consistent with the 1990 court decision. But if the records that are sought from the NCAA go beyond what FSU gave it in the course of its investigation, then I don’t see how the 1990 decision reaches this far.

Yesterday, we covered politicians in trouble because of an inconvenient Crackberry habit.

Today, it’s a tweet that caused a problem.

‘Tweets’ bring possibly illegal meeting to light.

Jennifer Gregerson, a member of the Mukilteo City Council (State of Washington), tweeted after a hearing on an controversial annexation measure:

“City staff and some council now Debriefing and relaxing at ivars for late night happy hour. Time for dinner, I think!”

Another member of the city council went to the recommended bar without having seen the Tweet and there found the mayor and four city council members happily ensconced around a well-stocked table.

Four is a quorum when there are seven members on a city council so if any of the members were talking about business, they were doing it outside the acceptable parameters of the state’s open meetings law.

City attorney Angela Belbeck was also at the table. She has assured a local newspaper that although the meeting took place immediately after a city council meeting, and although Gregerson’s tweet referred to de-briefing:

“It was strictly social. It was about what we were doing this summer. There was no city business whatsoever.”

City Council members misbehaving

Members of municipal legislative bodies like city councils, county commissions and school boards aren’t supposed to conduct the public’s business in private. Every state has its own version of a public meetings act that lays out its own requirements for open meetings.

In the age of email and e-groups, city council and school board members can talk about public business in closed-loop email chains that are just shared amongst themselves. These have been found to violate open meeting laws. A discussion or deliberation that occurs through e-mail is just as much a discussion or deliberation as a face-to-face meeting.

The members of the Ann Arbor City Council were recently exposed by the Ann Arbor News has having systematically sidestepped this expectation.

As the newspaper writes:

An examination of e-mails exchanged among various Ann Arbor City Council members during public meetings from late 2007 through last year shows that private discussions were regularly held in the course of council sessions.

Ann Arbor’s politicians were conducting personal political campaign activity via email during city council meetings, “jockeying over the politics of City Council salary increases” and in other ways discussing public business with each other during public meetings but via email.

Concealed carry in Idaho

The Idaho Sunshine Law underwent an interesting change in the 2009 legislative session.

It used to be that if you applied for a concealed carry permit, records pertaining to that were exempt from public disclosure. But, there was one exception…if you were a retired police officer, your application for a concealed carry permit wasn’t exempt under the law.

Now, it is, because the Idaho legislature made one change to its sunshine law in 2009, and that was it.

Your tax dollars at work

In North Carolina, the North Carolina Association of County Commissioners is hard at work lobbying the North Carolina state legislature to amend the state’s sunshine law so that if a citizen (or a media outlet) sues a government agency because of a records denial, and loses, the government agency could recover attorney fees.

At least part of the budget of the North Carolina Association of County Commissioners is paid for with dues that it receives from counties…that is, with tax dollars. Its pernicious that they are using tax money to lobby this way.

Sunshine Guardians

While I love the Sunshine Troublemaker of the Week award, in a spirit of collaboration with Sunshine Review, we are adopting the new designation of Sunshine Guardian.

Due to the magic of the internet, you can now immediately write about your own story about a Sunshine Guardian and have it appear on the front page of Sunshine Review. Go to the Help page to see how to get started, and once you’ve written your article, simply type:

[[Category:Sunshine Guardians]]

…at the end, and your article honoring a Sunshine Guardian will appear on the front page and in the overall news category for sunshine activists.

We’re back!

With apologies to all and sundry for our much-needed blog break, we’re back. Did you email me during my month-long hiatus? You might consider e-mailing me again.

I’m looking forward to enjoying the sun this summer. That would be the sun in the perfectly blue Wisconsin sky, because in a brief perusal of my usual open records news sources, it does not appear to be the case that while I wasn’t paying attention, local and state governments adopted a new sunshine-y attitude.