From the Rhinotimes (2/25/10): The irony is rich. The Rhino Times recently made a public records request for information on the development by the city of a public records policy.
One reason for the request was because we received a printout of a PowerPoint presentation on the proposed new policy, which has been under development now for almost two years. When we received the documents, we discovered that there are at least six different versions of two PowerPoint presentations out there.
It seems like a lot of work for a policy that should be one sentence: “The policy of the City of Greensboro regarding public records is to obey both the spirit and the letter of the state law (NCGS 132-1 et seq.)”
That is all that needs to be said. North Carolina is blessed with a state public records law that is simple, straightforward and easy to understand for most people, with the notable exception of one city department head and one assistant city attorney.
NCGS 132-1 (b) states, “The public records and public information compiled by the agencies of North Carolina government or its subdivisions are the property of the people.” If the employees of the City of Greensboro would just heed that one sentence, almost all of their problems would go away.
But what the documents from the city on the public records policy development indicate is that the two top city employees who are charged with developing the policy, Assistant City Manager Denise Turner, at a salary of $121,000 a year, and Public Affairs Director Pat Boswell, at $110,000 a year, have spent an inordinate amount of time developing a policy. The development of this policy started in January 2008, or at least that is the earliest document in the public records we received.
It is an incredible make-work project, with memos going back and forth between Boswell and Turner, and to each department head. The city does have a problem releasing public records, but the problem is mostly confined to two people – Boswell and Assistant City Attorney Becky Jo Peterson-Buie. Those two seem to look for rationales for not releasing information.
The last problem The Rhino Times had with getting public records on the compensation for police officers was caused by Boswell and Peterson-Buie. It is information that The Rhino Times receives in a different format every month. We were simply asking for the same information configured differently. The mistake that was made on our part was sending the request to the Public Affairs Department, where Boswell decided to ask Peterson-Buie if this was public information. Remember, this is information we receive in a different form every month. And two years ago we received the data in a similar form to what we were requesting. Peterson-Buie said it was not public information. Later City Attorney Terry Wood said that Peterson-Buie had made her decision based on an old law, not the current law.
The result was information that should have been released in days was not released for weeks, and was not released until the complaint went to city councilmembers, who called City Manager Rashad Young, who said to release the information.
That is background, but the point is that the person who has caused many of the problems with public records in the past couple of years is now one of the ones writing the policy. It is no wonder it has taken almost two years to write a simple policy.
The problem was Boswell and Peterson-Buie. Unfortunately, now Turner has to be added to the list. She is in charge of releasing public records, and the system has only gotten more cumbersome since she got involved in developing a policy to release documents that according to state law belong to the public.
It is stunning that Turner and Boswell apparently didn’t take the law more into account when they started the two-year odyssey to develop a city policy to do something that for the most part the city was already doing pretty well. The law says, “Every custodian of public records shall permit any record in the custodian’s custody to be inspected and examined at reasonable times and under reasonable supervision by any person and shall as promptly as possible, furnish copies thereof upon payment of any fees as may be prescribed by law.”
Other agencies don’t have a huge problem with providing public records. If you go to the clerk of court’s office and ask for records, they give them to you to examine and then they will make copies for you after you pay a fee that is “prescribed by law.” What they don’t do is tell you they have to consult an attorney, or to come back in 75 days.
At the Register of Deeds office you can go in, request a public document and they will find it and give it to you. Much of the information in the deeds office is now available online, so you can download the information yourself. There is no talk at the Register of Deeds office of waiting 75 days for a public record.
The proposed city policy creates unnecessary bureaucracy and sets absurd time limits on providing public information to people who request it and who by law own it. One draft of the policy states that the city has 75 working days, which is 15 weeks, to respond to a request for information. After 75 days, the person making the request can appeal to the City Council. In all the requests that The Rhino Times has made over the years it has never taken the city 75 days to fulfill the request.
Turner and Boswell seem to ignore both the spirit and the letter of the law and are much more concerned with creating a process that looks good on paper. Their policy appears to be designed to allow the city to acknowledge public records requests and then do nothing about them for up to 75 days.
The city has been tracking public records requests for the past couple of years, and The Rhino Times has made far more requests for public records than anyone else. The Rhino Times has also made some of the most broad reaching public records requests ever. We have received boxes of documents on Project Homestead, and in 2008 we received the active contracts from each city department. For weeks we received big stacks and boxes of contracts. It was in those contracts that the names of the 40 police offices who had filed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint against the city were discovered which made all of the research worthwhile.
The documents about the development of the policy show that Turner and Boswell ignored the fact that the custodian of the records is the one who is responsible for producing them. They want to appoint someone to be in charge of records requests, like Boswell and her department. Boswell is not the custodian of the records and has no legal responsibility to produce them. The custodian of the records has much more incentive to produce the records, since they are required to by law.
There are also two other aspects of the law that don’t appear to be taken into consideration. One is that anybody is supposed to be allowed to come in and examine public records at reasonable times, and copies made as “promptly as possible.” So a citizen who wants to see a public record should be able to walk into city hall, ask for the record and be allowed to read it. Then if the citizen wants a copy of that record, it should be provided “as promptly as possible.”
The problem in obtaining public records started when Mitch Johnson was hired as city manager. At that time everything had to go through the legal department, which caused a huge backup. Johnson was fired on March 3, 2009. Greensboro has a new city manager who has a completely different attitude about public records. The problem the city has is not the lack of a policy but the holdover of some employees who are still operating under the Johnson mode.
The proposed public records policy, as one might expect, also calls for the payment of a fee for copies. It will certainly cost the city more to process the piddley amount of money it receives than it takes in, because by law the city can only charge its cost to make the actual copy, not labor or anything else, and if the city starts charging, then those requesting public documents can simply request to examine the original and take notes from that or decide whether or not to have a copy made of certain pages.
At some point this will come before the City Council, and the City Council should by all means put an end to the lengthy process of developing a policy.
by John Hammer, Rhinotimes Editor