A large swath of North Carolina cities and towns have not been following a state law designed to grant easier access to public records after having more than a decade to comply.
State law requires that cities, towns and other public agencies maintain an index of all the databases they keep (see ‘What the law says,’ below), a comprehensive listing of the types of data they track.
The list is considered a public record by law and as such is public property, intended to be available to anyone who asks for it.
However, a recent request by The Garner Citizen for the indices from more than two dozen North Carolina municipalities has revealed that Garner and many other cities and towns had not created or maintained the index, despite the law being in effect since July 1997.
Even after the formal request, Garner officials and others around the state have been reluctant to create an index that fully complies with the provisions of the law. Officials say the staff time and effort necessary to create the index in the full detail required by law would take them away from more important duties.
“To be honest with you, to do the whole index according to the law is very labor intensive,” said Phil Faucette, the town’s information and technology director.
‘Good stewards of tax money’
A month after The Garner Citizen’s original request, the town has spent about 50 hours producing their list of databases, town officials said.
Under law, though, the town must also include field names for each database, many of which require a brief description so the public can understand what is being tracked.
Gathering the fields and descriptions will be especially time-consuming, Faucette said.
“If this was our only priority, we could probably have it all in a week. The issue is that we don’t know what fields there are, so we have to talk to the people actually using each database and ask, ‘What does this field mean?’”
Faucette doubts the final document is worth the time it will take town employees to assemble it.
“This [request] affects every single department in town who has to stop their daily business to go in and write down what goes into each one of these fields. … You’re taking people out of their daily jobs in order to keep track of this information.”
Garner maintains about 100 databases with more than 10,000 fields, Faucette estimates.
“This index is kind of an antiquated record to request,” Faucette said. “The [requirement was passed] way back when there weren’t a whole lot of databases. … [The completed index] is going to be a Raleigh phone book stack of paper.”
As the number of databases increased over the years, town officials opted to ignore the requirement, Faucette said.
“We made the decision five or six years ago — when we found out about the law — that it would be more beneficial for us to [create the index once it was requested] than to have staff keep up with this information when we may not ever get a request. We were trying to be good stewards of tax money.”
The Garner Citizen’s request for the index is the first the town has received.
After a decade, request should be ‘routine’
Public records advocates, however, say that waiting for a request to create the index undermines the law’s intent.
State legislators approved the requirement to introduce greater transparency into government as technology spurred larger changes in the way public agencies kept their records, experts said.
At the time, agencies and municipalities began using more computer databases for recordkeeping. Media interests wanted a better way to keep up with what public records were being created digitally, said Hugh Stevens, a lobbyist for the N.C. Press Association at the time. Municipalities wanted to keep public records requests manageable by avoiding the burden of having to produce their entire catalogue of databases, Stevens said.
Keeping a detailed index was a compromise between sides, he said.
“The tradeoff was [cities and towns] wouldn’t have to produce a database that they didn’t already have, and [the public] would be able to determine what they did have.”
Cities and towns have not kept up their side of the agreement, Stevens said.
That is not surprising to those familiar with the index requirement. No one tracks or enforces which municipalities keep an index, and requests for the record are rare.
The Office of Archives and History within the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources created guidelines for complying with the law. Its staff also offers free public records training, which covers the index, to municipalities. Becky McGee-Lankford, head of the local government records in the office, said the office does the best it can to spread the word, but it is up to towns and cities to follow the law.
“We point out that the statute is there and the [municipality] needs to comply with it,” she said.
Stevens has little sympathy for municipalities that struggle to fulfill the requirement after ignoring the law for so long.
“If they had set up this system when the law was enacted, it would be a routine request by now,” he said.
Garner not the only law breaker
Garner is not the only North Carolina town that has pushed the index to the back burner.
Of more than 30 municipalities surveyed across the state, only a few had fully complied with the law before The Garner Citizen requested the index.
In most municipalities, information technology departments manage the public databases and the indices. In many smaller towns and cities, the requirement was often greeted with surprise.
Goldsboro is one of those without an index. Like Garner, the city’s IT department is small, employing only four people when fully staffed. Before last month, no one had heard of the indexing law.
“It is a daunting task, but a lot of the work will be on the front side. It won’t take a lot to upkeep because we don’t add databases very often,” said Emily Sullivan, a computer technician for the city who is compiling the index.
Wake Forest, comparable in size to Garner, does not have an index either. IT officials there had heard of the law but did not realize the detail required until they received The Garner Citizen’s request. Compiling the fields from scratch would likely require enlisting an outside contractor, they said.
“It could be a challenge for a small shop to come up with it by ourselves,” Town IT Director Tom LeBarge said.
For other small communities like Knightdale and Wendell, creating and maintaining the index is even less of a priority.
But not all municipalities were unprepared to produce the index.
Some larger municipalities such as Charlotte, Winston-Salem and Cary have received requests in the past for the index and were able to quickly reproduce an updated version.
Cary began complying with the law months before it became effective, said Cary IT Director Bill Stice. The town ran a pilot program to explore what kind of time and work was needed to meet the state’s recommendations. Though expensive, the town complies with the law and now actively considers the indexing requirement when purchasing new software or developing its own. The town also asks employees to make field headings clear and meaningful on the databases they create.
Transparency about the records is the goal, Stice said.
“When we release information from our public databases, we like people to know what they are reading,” he said. According to Stice, processing requests is now mostly automated.
Garner’s indexing future
Faucette is now exploring how to automate Garner’s database index as well. He hopes to have most of the index completed by Friday.
But regardless, Faucette insists that smaller municipalities are at a disadvantage in complying with the law. They have to compile pieces of the record from dozens of locations on the town’s computer network instead of from a few centralized ones.
“For larger entities, [the request] is no big deal, but for us it is more difficult. … It is the difference between running one report versus 85 reports,” he said.
After about six months, enough of the index will have changed that much of it will have to be recreated, he said. Despite the challenges, the town will not consider the indexing requirement when it purchases future database software, he said.
Overall, Faucette says Garner has done a good job of keeping up with the state’s public records law. Many of his colleagues don’t know anything about the law’s requirements. Those requesting the record should understand that too, he said.
“You read the law and say, ‘Okay, I’ll just go in and ask to see their index,’ and they’ll reach behind them and pull it off the shelf and hand it to you,” Faucette said. “That’s the way it should be. But unfortunately that’s not the way it works.”
by Paul Tambasco, Garner Citizen News Editor