Open Records

In Manatee County, Florida, the school board is looking at deleting $21 million from the school district’s 2008-09 budget. They asked each principal to submit proposed budgets showing where the cuts would come from. As they said prior to April 7:

“All of the information in administrators’ hands has been included on our Web site and our employees and the public has been invited to review and make suggestions.”

But, as of April 18, no such proposals had appeared on the website.

As reported in School Stonewalling, the local newspaper, the Bradenton Herald asked–three times–for the budget cut outlines. When the school district finally handed over the documents on April 18, school administrators said the documents were no longer relevant because the district had already worked things out–obviously, with no public input, since the public didn’t have any idea what was going on. As the paper said,

“We have to wonder if district officials do not want any member of the public - be they teachers, staff, citizen watchdogs or the press - to read some documents for fear of real open discussions on issues before top school officials predetermine and then release their own plan, carved in stone.”

Meanwhile, the school board has scheduled a workshop to review its policy on public records.

In North Carolina, it turns out that three members of Gov. Easley’s staff regularly deleted their e-mails. The e-mails that they deleted might be important public records.

Last month, Gov. Easley told the News & Observer that although these staff members “thought” they had been told by Renee Hoffman, the governor’s press secretary, to destroy these public records, that Thank Goodness, none of them actually did. Or, as he put it,

“The good news is, in spite of all that, they all kept their stuff like they were supposed to. They all followed the [correct] policy.”

The newspaper came to believe that this wasn’t the case, and that potentially important e-mails had been deleted:

The News & Observer has filed a lawsuit against the administration; Andrew Vanore, the governor’s counsel, is looking forward to waging a vigorous defense paid for by the taxpayers of North Carolina.

It’s time again for a round-up of the best of FOIA blogging around the country. As always, our round-up pays special attention to blogs we haven’t noticed before. We find a lot of great local blogs this way. Enjoy!

All of these links lead to great stories. Let’s get started.

Kansas: Johnson County wanted $1,300 for 900 pages of documents; nearby Overland Park wants $29,500 for about 8,300 pages. Don’t ask why; you’ll get a migraine.

Kentucky: Depth Reporting is a great blog, even if it is run by a professional reporter. We don’t entirely disdain such people, even though we are mere “citizen journalists”, the hoi polloi and PDQ night clerks of the internet. But I digress. The Kentucky state police violated the open records law.

Louisiana: Did or did not Alexandria Mayor Jacques Roy violate the open records law? Don’t know yet.

New York: Homeland Security Alert! Attorney General Andrew Cuomo can’t release his schedule without imperilling global security!

Ohio: Maggie Thurber advises readers on finding out about government staff salaries.

Pennsylvania: The Wyomissing School Board tried to bargain away the public’s right to know. Don’t do that.

Pennsylvania: Reflections on Pennsylvania’s new open records top honcho. But not all is well with public access in the state. It’s positively Sisyphean, actually.

South Carolina: 54 days to deliver government salary information. Unions at fault? (This blog post also refers to the Sunshine Blogger Project.)

Tennessee: Why did Elbert Jefferson take time out of his busy schedule to go to Memphis to lobby for a bill to make it harder to access public documents?

Texas: Should city council members be able to police their own spending? Um, no. Also from the Lone Star State, don’t miss The Purge, Part 12. It’s better than Masterpiece Theater.

Virginia: Reading The Hook reminds me of why so often it would just be easier to deny the records request.

Read, enjoy, comment. As a sidenote, I started this blog in April 2007. There are vastly more blog posts and newspaper articles about state-level open records access issues than there were a year ago.

Thanks to Maverick recently returned from a roller derby tour to Seattle, for doing the research for this post!

In 2007, the city of Detroit spent $8.4 million in a settlement of a variety of police whistleblower lawsuits. Or, to be more precise, the taxpayers of the city of Detroit spent that $8.4 million, which could have been spent on improving schools, repairing roads, or essential public services in a city desperate for all those things, had the money not been spent compensating for a long record of disgraceful, obstructionist, and illegal behavior.

Now Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who is facing a criminal trial, is denying a public records request by Detroit’s two big-city newspapers on the grounds that his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself clashes with the state’s open records law, which requires him to turn over the requested documents.

Constitutional experts say the case raises “fascinating questions”. It is fascinating, but not because the outcome should be in any doubt. If public officials got to withhold public documents–documents that, by definition, belong to the public–whenever those documents established or tended to establish their criminal malfeasance, then we might as well pour kerosene on the open records statutes and throw in a lit match.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruling in re: Webster Hubbell is not on point, contrary to what one attorney is claiming. The documents that showed his criminal behavior were not public to begin with.

Welcome to Blog Waukesha.

Sometimes at the Lucy Burns Institute, we get e-mails or phone calls from people seeking some guidance on how to word an open records request.

We’re always glad to get these calls. We’ve noticed, though, that some potential FOIA requestors believe that there is a perfect way to word a request such that you are more or less guaranteed to get the records you’re asking for.

This is a myth. The myth has sprung up because of all the records denials that people get where the government agency denying the records implies that their failure to deliver the requested documents is due to the incomprehensibility of the request they received, or its vagueness, or its overbroadness, or various other alleged faults of the request.

Often, good faith efforts on the part of the requestor to specify the records he or she wants is met with a passive-aggressive, game-playing denial by an official at a government agency who is not making a good faith effort to comply.

If the FOIA compliance officer at an agency that receives a request is filled with a moderate to strong desire to comply, that person will figure out how to fill it, rather than wearing the requestor’s time, patience, and financial and legal resources thin.

If you don’t get the public documents you’ve asked for, this is usually not because of a failure on your part to write the request in a perfect way that will trigger the response you want. It’s because the archivist isn’t particularly interested in getting you what you want.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Maricopa County, Arizona, is just one example–although a particularly egregious one.

See also The long and winding road of FOIA requests.

Kent Fiscal Watch has started a tremendously useful local website geared toward helping residents of the Town of Kent, in Putnam County, New York, know everything they could possibly want to know about local governments, government budgeting and expenditures, and public records.

Blogs or websites like this are sometimes called “place blogs”, because they intensively cover one particular (usually small) geographic area, allowing information and news to accumulate over time to create a rich historical record and a place for residents to come together and discuss the news of the day–or contribute news, as the case may be.

Here’s a good link I found on the Kent Fiscal Watch Site, Ten Steps to Getting Government Information.

We’d like to introduce you to David Koenig, our 22nd Sunshine Troublemaker of the Week. Mr. Koenig lives in Federal Way, Washington. All of our STOTWs are wonderful, and Mr. Koenig is a deserving peer.

The headline that attracted our eye? Federal Way man has won thousands in public records lawsuits.

All these settlements relate to underlying violations of Washington’s open records law.

Our regular readers won’t be surprised to learn that the cities who paid David Koenig for their errors and violations are pretty much still under the impression that their errors and violations were innocent and that Mr. Koenig is a pest.

Heidi Wachter, the city attorney for Lakewood, told a reporter for the News Tribune in Tacoma that she didn’t ignore Mr. Koenig’s record but made an error by denying him some of what he had requested.

Why do city officials so often think they have followed the open records law when they hand over a few documents and illegally or erroneously deny the rest? The fact that they properly gave him a few records does not let them off the hook for refusing to give him public records to which he was legally entitled. Alluding to the records they did give him is a childish excuse and a mistake for which the city’s taxpayers–not Attorney Wachter–must now pay.

My hero, Mr. Koenig, says:

“To me, they were lying or didn’t have enough brains to walk upright.”.

Lakewood is now planning to sue Mr. Koenig allegedly to find out whether the city is properly responding to his requests.

My answer: No, you’re not. That’s why a court just ordered you to pay him $40,000.

Mr. Koenig’s attorney’s answer: ““These people should stop worrying about David Koenig and get their house in order.”

We luv ya, Mr. Koenig. Keep up the great work.

As my 29 regular readers can see, I’m experimenting with a different blog theme. The quotation format in the old blog theme was always hard to read, so I’m going to try this one for awhile. Like it? Hate it?

A more important renovation is underway at our project, WikiFOIA. When we started WF a bit over a year ago, we chose PBWiki, one of several wikifarms. PBWiki has been great, but we’ve been wanting to add some features that are much easier to incorporate using the MediaWiki format–the format used at Wikipedia. We’re gradually going to shift some of WikiFOIA’s content to a subportal at Sunshine Review, which uses MediaWiki. It’s very beta but you can get the general idea.

Two other wikis I’ve contributed to that use MediaWiki to focus on a particular area are Ballotpedia and Judgepedia. For people who are still getting used to Wikipedia, it’s a hike in tall weeds to persuade them of the beauty of the wiki format for curating information about specific subject areas. Some of my other favorite wikis are:

The Cookbook Wiki.

Wiki Travel.

Lyric Wiki.

And last but not least,

Wookiepedia.

Thanks to 123 Idaho and the Minnesota Coalition of Government Information for the links.

There are state-based freedom-of-information coalitions in most states. I’m glad to see that some of them are adding blogs to their information resources on the internet. For organizations, there are pros and cons to having blogs, but blogs are hard to beat for offering quick, frequent news updates.