Voice For Liberty

Tag: Open records

  • When A Records Request Fails

    When a citizen makes a records requests and the records that were received don’t match the request, what should the citizen do?

    The records I received match the request I made in that they relate to the governmental entity and its relationship to a certain business, but they are for a time period much older than what I requested. Further, what wasn’t supplied to me are documents that I am certain exist, and would be dated within the time frame I specified.

    Do citizen records requests come with a warranty?

  • Earthjustice in Kansas: The Press Release

    I’ve recently learned that the radical environmentalist group Earthjustice played a role in the rejection of a coal-fired power plant in Kansas. I didn’t learn that from any Kansas news source, but only from Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, and only then long after the permit for the plant was denied. See Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius at Earthjustice.

    Now I see Earthjustice’s press release Kansas Rejects Massive Sunflower Coal-Fired Power Plant.

    What did Earthjustice do in Kansas, and how did they do it? These are things Kansans need to know. To that end, I’ve filed a request under the Kansas Open Records Act asking for records of the correspondence between the governor’s office and Earthjustice. Hopefully the governor’s office will respond to this request in a way that will let Kansans have access to information they have the right to know.

  • Wichita Council Member Jeff Longwell: We Can, and Do, Read

    Wichita City Council Member Jeff Longwell, in the news article Little time to review Warren loan terms (July 1, 2008 Wichita Eagle), was reported as remarking “It’s unlikely many residents would read the full contract even if it had been made public earlier.”

    Mr. Longwell, many people in Wichita do read documents such as these. I think a better question is whether city council members read and understand these documents. This is from before Mr. Longwell’s time on the council, but in the article The Real Scandal at City Hall, I report how city council members are sometimes not aware of even the most basic facts about city affairs:

    … council members were described as being surprised upon learning that the industrial revenue bonds and property tax abatement awarded to a local business also included a sales tax break. How could they be surprised? The City of Wichita website contains a nicely-done page titled “Industrial Revenue Bonds” (located at http://www.wichitagov.org/Business/EconomicDevelopment/IRB) (This is the first result that appears when you use the wildly popular Google search engine and search for “Wichita IRB.”) The first link on this page is titled “IRB Overview: Industrial Revenue Bond Issuance in the State of Kansas,” and you don’t have to read very far before you come to the sentence reading “Generally, property and services acquired with the proceeds of IRBs are eligible for sales tax exemption.”

    (The city’s website has been rearranged a little since then. The new location for this page is http://www.wichita.gov/CityOffices/CityManager/Urban/EconomicDevelopment/IRB/.)

    Besides being wrong on whether people read documents like these, I think Mr. Longwell’s statement reveals an unfortunate attitude towards the people of Wichita. I don’t think he always felt this way, as earlier this year it was reported he “strongly believes in transparency in government.” (Rule seeks to stop leaks after private city council meetings)

    Mr. Longwell is correct in that the Old Town Warren Theater loan documents should have been released to the city council and the public earlier. Mr. Longwell could have shown us evidence of his belief in transparency by moving to delay yesterday’s council action until these documents could be read, digested, and debated.

  • Wichita Public School District’s Taxation Without Information

    Taxation without information. I wish I could take credit for inventing this phrase that I recently heard someone use. It captures very well the key characteristic of USD 259, the Wichita public school district, and its campaign for the proposed 2008 bond issue.

    As highlighted by Wichita Eagle columnist Mark McCormick in his column District’s public files ought not cost $1,000, the Wichita public school district doesn’t like to release information. Mr. McCormick accuses some bond issue opponents of using Kansas Open Records Act information requests simply to “make hay for another ‘No’ campaign straw man.” I’ll explain another day why he’s wrong with the straw man argument, but even if he was correct, the people still have the right to know some basic facts.

    The district does release a lot of information, of course. Whether it is useful in making a decision about the proposed bond issue is up to each voter. Sometimes these facts have been expressed unclearly. This was the case when I and a number of journalists used an incorrect figure for the cost of the safe rooms. The district issued a clarification, so now we have the correct information -– maybe.

    Other needed clarifications, however, are not easy to obtain. The number of classrooms at each school, the subject of one records request, is an example. It seems that people intuitively understand the number of classrooms. They reason like this: “For school A, the district may estimate an enrollment of B students. The goal for class size is C students per class. Currently school A has D number of classrooms. So let’s do the arithmetic and see if school A needs more classrooms.”

    Is it as simple as this, or is the situation more complicated? Doesn’t the district go through a process similar to this when it figures how many teachers are needed at each school?

    More importantly, since overcrowding is given as one of the most important reasons why the Wichita school district needs a bond issue, shouldn’t facts and figures like these be known by the district, readily available, and shouldn’t the public be able to see them?

    Recently I attended an event hosted by Citizens Alliance for Responsible Education, a citizen group that supports the bond issue. By way of what I considered to be a slightly bizarre method, a handful of experts from USD 259 addressed citizen concerns and answered questions. If you attended the event and knew little or nothing about the bond issue, you would have learned something, at least USD 259’s take on the issue. For those familiar with the issues, there was no new information presented.

    Afterwards, the friend I attended the event with was pressured by a representative of the school district’s architect. Now that we have given you the information, he said, will you support the bond issue? This was a slightly better offer than what Wichita school board member Betty Arnold made to me, which was, as reported in The Wichita Eagle “So if you had the correct information, then would you support the bond issue?” My response was “If I had correct information, then I could make a decision.”

    Sometimes even simple tasks regarding information are either difficult to perform or simply overlooked. As of today, June 19, 2008, the website for Citizens Alliance for Responsible Education at vote4kids2008.org still states the bond issue special election will be held on May 6, 2008, when at CARE’s own request, the Wichita school board canceled that election on April 7, 2008.

    The Wichita school district’s attitude towards the public is demonstrated by two events. One, as related in In Wichita, Don’t Take Photographs of the School Administration Building! which tells how a citizen, standing on a public sidewalk taking a photograph of the Wichita school district administration building, was ordered by a district security guard to stop.

    The second, much more serious, is the district’s willingness to rewrite its own rules when it feels things aren’t going its way, as explained in Wichita School Board Poisons Democracy.

    I have several basic requests for information pending at the Wichita school district. Simple things like where on the district’s website can I see test scores? Where can I learn the definition of a “violent act” so that we can properly understand statistics made available at the Kansas State Department of Education? I will report on the results. Until then, it is taxation without information.

  • Wichita public schools: Open records requests are a burden

    Listen to an audio broadcast of this article here.

    I recently learned that USD 259 (the Wichita, Kansas public school district) considers it a burden when citizens make requests for records. At least that’s what Lynn Rogers, vice-president of the board of USD 259, told me at a May 12, 2008 meeting when I was invited to express concerns regarding my opposition to the proposed 2008 bond issue. I suspect the other board members and administration officials agree with him.

    As a government institution, the Wichita public school district is subject to the Kansas Open Records Act, which requires it to respond to citizen requests for information. The ability to smoothly and competently, with a minimum of fuss, provide records to any requesting member of the public is a core competency that we should routinely expect of a public agency.

    It is not the fault of a member of the public if a government agency is thrown into disarray by a few public records requests; rather, that suggests that the agency has not yet developed a professional competence in records archiving and management. The budget of the school district is $544,384,275 a year (2006-2007 school year). If they spent 0.01% of that on records management, the annual amount available for records management and retrieval would be $54,438.

    I’d encourage the Wichita school district to follow the practice of District 300 in Illinois, which not only provides copies of records requested in a professional manner but posts all records requests and records retrieved under those requests on its own website, so anyone can see them. In this way the effort of the district to produce records is leveraged, and more citizens can become aware of school district information. The Illinois District 300 site may be viewed here: The District 300 Freedom of Information Act Online Program.

    In order for school districts to effectively educate their students there must be a strong bond of trust between the school and its stakeholders in the community — parents, students, taxpayers, and district employees. These bonds of trust are undermined when the school district carps about providing records to the very public with whom it needs to build strong bonds. No better example of this is the scolding that interim superintendent Martin Libhart delivered to me at the May 12 meeting. “We do know how many classrooms we have, I can assure you of that,” he said. So Mr. Libhart, why not share those numbers with us?

    Wichita school district officials say they want to be held accountable. Responding to records requests is one way for them to fulfill that desire. But the district’s attitude when faced with requests filed by citizens reveals a different attitude.

    As Randy Brown recently wrote in The Wichita Eagle: “Without open government, you don’t have a democracy.” I rely on a greater authority, Thomas Jefferson, who said: “The same prudence, which, in private life, would forbid our paying our money for unexplained projects, forbids it in the disposition of public moneys.”

  • Open records in Kansas follow-up

    I have been recruited to participate in the Sunshine Blogger Project, an effort to gauge the compliance of the nations’ governors with open records laws as they exist in each state. I wrote about my experience with the office of Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius in this article: Open Records in Kansas.

    The letter I received from JaLynn Copp, the Assistant Chief Counsel to Governor Sebelius, was so confusing that I wrote back requesting clarification. I had to communicate this request by writing on the processed fibers of dead trees, which were then delivered to Topeka by carbon-spewing trucks operated by the United States Postal Service, as Ms. Copp did not share an email address with me.

    My records request had specifically asked that the email records I was requesting be delivered to me electronically. That seemed to make a lot of sense, as email is nothing if not electronic. But the governor’s office won’t comply with that request.

    The governor’s office, legitimately, must review the emails to determine whether any fall under the exceptions to the open records act. The office will do that by reading the emails on a computer. Then, if an email is judged not to fall under one of the exemptions, it will be printed and sent to me, at a cost of $.25 per page.

    There seems to be no interest at the governor’s office in providing the records in any other form. I could wind up spending thousands of dollars to print thousands of pages of spam.

    The Wichita Eagle wrote a story about this, and a few of the comments left by readers on the newspaper’s website were alarming. One comment read: “The request was irresponsible! If there was a legitimate need for particular information, that would be one thing, but to demand all of the emails the Governor received across any given four days is ludicrous, and wasteful. … If there was a specific issue needing verified or researched, and a public need or good, then the fees would be onerous.”

    I might ask this writer these questions: Who determines what qualifies as a “legitimate need?” How would I know if there was a specific issue needing research, without seeing all the emails? Should we rely on government agencies to judge which records will satisfy our interests?

    Another reader left a comment that made a charge of hypocrisy for the media wanting government records to be open, but refusing to open their own records. This reader has forgotten the difference between the government and a private institution.

  • Open records in Kansas

    Recently I was recruited to participate in the Sunshine Blogger Project. Its purpose is to “find out whether America’s governors properly archive the e-mail that comes into and goes out of their offices, and are able to provide copies of those e-mails when members of the public request them.”

    I believe that open records and meetings are important, both to news media and citizens, so I agreed to take part in the project.

    On February 7, 2008 I mailed (by postal mail) my request for the records of interest, which are emails sent and received by the office of Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius for a recent four-day period. We asked that the emails be delivered electronically, which seems natural given that computerization is the essence of email.

    On February 15 I received a letter from JaLynn Copp, the Assistant Chief Counsel to the Governor, stating that the office is “in the process of reviewing your request and generating a response.”

    As of February 25 I hadn’t received that response, so I called to inquire. I left a message requesting my call to be returned. Over the next few days I made several calls and left messages, but no one returned my call. Finally I was able to reach the Assistant Chief Counsel, who then briefly described the details spelled out in a letter that I received on February 28.

    The Governor’s office has approximately 25 full-time employees, the letter explained. It will take a minimum of two hours for each employee to conduct a review of each employee’s computer to see if any of the requested emails fall under one of the many exemptions to the Kansas Open Records Act. This adds up to $1,350. The office requests payment before any work will be done.

    The letter I received contained this paragraph:

    I will look into the possibility of providing our response in electronic form as you have requested. This may be an additional charge; I can let you know what that is if it is possible. If it is not possible, then we would provide the information in hard copy and this would cost .25 per page. Of course, we will not know the up front costs of how many pages this would be until we do the searches. This would be assessed after we have done the searches and would need to be paid before we turned over the documents to you.

    I found this paragraph remarkable. I am not able to fully understand what this means, and I have written to ask for clarification. Part of what I wrote is this:

    I have a question or two. Will the total cost be the estimated $1,350 for reviewing plus $.25 per printed page that is supplied to me? Will your office be performing the review reading from printed pages or from reading the emails on a computer in their original electronic form?

    I ask because it seems to me that if the review is going to be conducted by reading the emails on a computer, then printing costs could be avoided. Alternatively, if the review will be performed by reading printed pages of paper, then perhaps the $.25 per printed page charge could be waived, as the material would have been already printed.

    I’ll update this article when I receive an answer. It may take some time, as the Assistant Chief Counsel did not share an email address with me.

    Recommended sites: State Sunshine and Open Records, WikiFOIA, the wiki for helping people understand and use the Freedom of Information Act at the state and local level, Kansas Sunshine Coalition for Open Government.

  • Because Government Should Have Accountability

    Because Government Should Have Accountability
    Paul M. Weyrich, Chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation (Click here to read the article.)

    In an article from The Wichita Eagle published on May 3, 2005 titled “Ice rink figures don’t add up, records show” we find this quote: “Ice Sports Wichita has been on a downward slide longer than the city staff admits in a report the City Council is scheduled to act on today, records show.” These records were obtained through a request filed under the Kansas Open Records act. My understanding of this news story is that City of Wichita staff has been misleading everyone — including the mayor and city council — about the true state of the ice rink’s financial affairs. If not for the reporters who obtained the records, this deception might be continuing.

    The commentary by Paul M. Weyrich referenced above contains examples of where the Federal Freedom of information Act has been used to uncover governmental misdeeds. The article also mentions a bill titled the OPEN Government Act, designed to “ensure that government acts promptly and efficiently in responding to FOIA requests.”