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Making Public Records Public
If Attorney General John Kroger has his way, Oregonians should soon know more about their ability to access state records and take part in public meetings. On Wednesday he announced that the DOJ has put the state's Public Records and Meetings Manual online. He also created an introductory Citizen's Guide to the somewhat complex world of public records requests, as well as an online request form (pdf) for people seeking DOJ documents.
The other big part of Wednesday's announcement was the news of the creation of a new position: the Government Transparency Counsel, whose mission is to "improve the enforcement of Oregon's open government laws":
The position will coordinate all public records requests to the Department of Justice. It will also coordinate DOJ's legal services to state agencies, boards and commissions on issues related to the Public Records Law. The new position will serve as a resource to Oregon's 36 district attorneys who handle appeals from local government denials of public records requests, and it will advise the Attorney General with respect to appeals from state agency denials of public records requests. The goal is to ensure that Oregon's Public Records Law is consistently and correctly applied, as the law requires.
At the same time, the Attorney General's office recently moved to limit the information that can be released about businesses accused of consumer fraud.
All of this falls on the heels of a fair amount of public records news. Most directly, there was a very public disagreement about whether or not someone could post the DOJ's copyrighted manual online. (The issue seems moot now that the state has posted the manual itself, but you can read the whole back and forth on U of O professor Bill Harbaugh's blog.) And then there's the Portland start-up Nozzl Media, which is based on the idea that "vast repositories of public records could be scoured by software robots and made easily available online to citizens."
What stories based on public records requests — and the information they uncovered — have stuck with you? (For a few examples, here's The Oregonian on who plays the lottery, Willamette Week on Portland's heaviest water users, and The New York Times on water polluters across the country (including in Oregon)).
If you're not a reporter, or an enterprising citizen muckracker, will a more streamlined public records process encourage you to make a request? What would you look for?
GUESTS:
- Bill Harbaugh: Economics professor at the University of Oregon and author of the Open Up Oregon blog
- John Kroger: Oregon Attorney General
- Brent Walth: Investigative reporter at The Oregonian
- Steve Woodward: CEO of Nozzl Media
Tagged as: attorney general · public records
Photo credit: mightymightymatze / Creative Commons
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Part one:
I tend to agree with Jerry Cressa for a few reasons.
Governments are often hostile to to citizen efforts, even City Council efforts, to get adequate information so as to understand issues and decisiins. If you are poor, the financial obstacles they raise can become significant. Recently, the City of Baker City wanted to charge me $108.00 for information that one might reasonably expect would be information they would have already collected to explain their efforts to enforce a property maintenance law. Later, they produced much of the information I requested in a police "dog & pony show" for the City Council."
Most recently, I asked for information concerning the public versus private benefit of the Baker City Municipal Airport, a $20 million dollar facility owned by Baker City, which, according to the latest reported budget, is using $85,288 this year from our General Fund, to help finance the airport. I requested information that would reflect how much use was related to obvious public interest like public safety and fire, and how much use was related to private use, such as recreational flying or charter flights. I was told "these records are not kept by the City. The Fixed Base Operator does keep track of the number of flights, but most likely not the category (public, private, medical, etc.)." The FBO operator's wife confirmed that the record on this is not recorded. No record, no need to report. What can be done about that?
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2:
More importantly, the city wanted to charge me to provide the names of those who lease publicly owned property subsidized by the Federal Government and city taxpayers. To avoid the charge, I asked the operator of the airport. The reason I wanted the information is that the average citizen has no idea whether a City Councilor or member of another administrative governmental body, like the Airport Commission, has a conflict of interest when making decisions that affect the airport. My thought was that we ought to know whether governing officials were using the airport for private use, such as leasing a hangar there. The FBO refused to give out the names of those sub-leasing city owned hangars that he leases from the city.
So, there is a question about what information is available from the private portion of public/private partnerships. There is another example locally involving a private non-profit corporation that receives the bulk of their funds from public dollars to administer a previously public function.
Please ask Attorney General Kroger to comment on these situations, and how a citizen may proceed to collect information that is perceived to be in the "public interest" from private contractors in charge of public assets.
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Most recently, I asked for information concerning the public versus private benefit of the Baker City Municipal Airport
http://additivesfoods.weebly.com/ http://foodadditives.ucoz.com/ http://helpgodme.hpage.com -
Pie Charts for Numbers.
I am guessing that most of the people that listen to this show would be able to understand and imagine what 50% looks like. This is however, in my experience, not the case with the general public.
And even if they might be able to picture 50% they won't be able to compare two percentages like 39% and 47% if they are used in the same sentence.
But they can totally understand pie charts.
If you -tell- them there were 500 breeding pairs of American Eagles in the lower 48 states when DDT was made unavailable for use in the US--And that now there are over 10,000 pairs; They can almost get the scope of change. But if you put that same data in a little pie-chart and they -see- that 500 is just a sliver of 10,000 they come away with a much broader understanding right away.
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Traffic citations, revenue generators for police departments in cities and counties throughout Oregon, are often made with traffic traps and at late hours. Public records of these citations including time, location and type of vehicle would give evidence that the methods and motives of the police departments is not necessarily public safety. Public records of how many tickets are contested, how many cases are taken to court, how many tickets are reduced etc etc. One big question where does the ticket money go? Let us follow the money.
It would then be easy to do an analysis if the police work is really helping us the citizen or generating citations and strengthening revenue generating infrastructure.
If in fact radar guns and hired photo vans don't target then it would give defense of the double taxing polices of police departments. And if in fact they do target they will have to do some hard work--find the real offenders.
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As difficult as it is to exercise FIOA rights with State and Federal agencies, I am more concerned over the lack of any sort of FOIA right to access data held on me by private companies.
While I may have the right to view my credit report, I don't have an equivalent right to view (and challenge) data tied to me via Facebook, Amazon, Google, and other private entities. Such data is often now used by prospective employers to pre-screen candidates. Without FIOA-like access to these large, non-public databases, we all are at risk of being denied services, jobs, housing or other things due to potentially erroneous data contained in private databases.
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I've never requested public information but I've heard some stories. One reported on OPB a few months ago concerned a FOIA request that has taken over 20 years to fulfill. When the requester finally received the requested information, most of it was lined through so it couldn't be read. What good is that?
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x1657542
http://sunshineweek.blogs.com/my_weblog/2007/07/oldest-pending-.html
Government and corporations do not want to provide information to the public so they can continue nefarious and illegal practices in the dark. Most citizens won't willingly submit to the frustration, time and effort to discover answers to their often valid questions.
Obfuscation and resistance by entities who wish to keep their activities unscrutinized has created the buzz word "transperency" which tends to mean little in reality.
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Can you ask Attorney General Kroger (or any of your guests) to talk about House Bill 2500 of the last session, an initiative that aims to establish a web site to provide details about state spending?
For what it's worth, I'm very supportive of the intent behind HB 2500, but ambivalent about whether the specific bill will take us far enough or in the right direction.
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The access of public records should be streamlined, because it makes functional sense, and it is good customer service. I am a little concerned especially after hearing from your guest, Bill Harbaugh, that the public may really just turn into a bigger pain---with not exactly attempts at muckraking, but rather nitpicking. On every side there seems to be more conspiracy theories, then useful theories. Nowadays everyone thinks they are a detective, everyone is looking for a fight, and statistics are a complicated business and they are easily misinterpreted. But I guess there isn't another way to be transparent, without, well, being transparent.
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Is the issue of data (I'm not sure what the difference between public records and public data is) also within the purview of the office of transparency? What about the issue of format? Making records/data (even ORS) available in a way that can be searched or data can be extracted is a much higher standard of transparency than just making a PDF available (fee or no fee).
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Hi K :)
There's a whole set of practices around this. I agree that it's of vital importance that things are published/encoded/syndicated in a way that makes them genuinely useful on the Internet. Really, that's one of the most important things, as very small decisions (i.e. decisions that have minimal impact on expenditures) will have a massive determinative effect on whether information gets used in ways that are useful.
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This is a very important point, and as Peter points out, is an easy and inexpensive way to make a big difference. Our city administrators make one page agendas available in a searchable PDF document, but many pages of minutes and any supporting documents are unsearchable PDFs, little more than photocopies. If one can afford Acrobat professional, it allows a pretty fair optical character recognition routine on them that will make them searchable, but why don't they just post them as searchable PDFs? Another question is, in this day and age, why isn't a video record of public meetings required instead of the written subjective summary minutes version of what occurred?
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The experience I have with public records is limited to my experience on a community college newspaper three years ago. Aside from paying for copies of the records we requested, repeatedly asking for public records, and being treated like fake journalists (we were student-journalists, way to undermine your institutions credibility), the biggest problem we had was getting into the executive sessions. There are some instances when the press is allowed in the sessions to make sure the law is followed i.e. officials stay on topic and don't make decisions before the sessions is over and adjourned to regular session. Also, once I used the FOIA, I was advised that I had engaged the legal system and at that point, I needed legal representation. We also found out that the college wouldn't protect the newspaper for any reason.
On a side note, the direct result of our reporting was the resignation of the college president. He was known for hard drinking, flouting meeting laws (discussing school business with what constituted a quorum of school board members), and falling asleep at the state capitol while on school time. But he didn't get in trouble for these things, this was found out after the fact. The college deans concealed this information and decided to bark up the tree of porn on the college president's computer (it was educational material for the human sexuality class), and the fact that he didn't follow the traditions of the college. The traditions hadn't been codified until after he left.
Nonetheless, I know that our job as reporters would have been easier if the information we needed would have simply been furnished to us without all the lawyers.
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Government agencies should still charge for hardcopies if online copies are available for free download. There's no reason that the corporations who find it more convenient to have a hard bound copy of the document printed by the agency can't pay for the convenience. I work for a company that regularly choses to purchase a physical copy rather than just use the free version online. It would at least recoup some funding.
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There is an obvious conflicts of interest that affects every public records request. For example, if a request is made to see the emails of an employee, the state agency often has that employee gather up the pertinent emails. It is simply too much to expect that someone who knows they have misbehaved will hand over all of the materials they have related to a matter. The first request can become an opportunity to purge records, like emails and text messages, social networking, etc. Wouldn't the AG represent the state against claims that they mishandled records? Since, the attorney general represents the state's interest. can the AG just decide that the potential of loosing court cases and paying out large settlements is simply not in the interest of state government.
There is a simple solution to all of this. Use an information system to let citizens search working papers, emails, documents, records, policies, and procedures. No person needs to be involved. Reserve an obudsman to arbitrate when records are protected for some reason, like security. Give a mandate that evidence showing policies and laws have been violated loose their protection and must be released with fees reimbursed, along with an administrative service fee or reward paid to the person who made blew the whistle.
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Since 2000 I have been trying to obtain a copy of the AG's Opinion/LOA on the grounds for removal of a member of a Building Codes Division Board. I have written a letter (2000), spoken personally to the AG General (Hardy Myers) outside the office during one of his smoking breaks, spoken to a member of the AG staff at a later date; and have still not gotten any reply.
This AG advice exists in a 3-ring binder located in the Building Codes Division in Salem. But they have contually obstructed releasing the information. One time they required that I know the exact date (even though they could have just brought the binder to the front counter and we could have paged through it together). At another time they utilized the fact that state agencies can charge a fee for producing public records. They concocted an exorbitant fee of $600 to produce the document.
The sad truth is that the AG exists solely for the purpose of defending state agencies in court, should the public sue them for not following state statutes (which they often do not). The AG is not interested in seeing that state government actually follows the laws and statutes.
I asked a Senate Committee Chair (Kate Brown) to request this Opinion or LOA from the AG at one of the Board Appointment Meetings; and she indicated there would be a significant charge from the AG to produce that, and that she wasn't interested. Thus, when people are appointed to state boards, there is still no information given to them as to any grounds for their removal.
A Board Member may be removed from a Board for actions "contrary to the public good." In the case of the Building Codes Division's Building Codes Structures Board and Residential Structures Board; such contrary actions certainly would include deliberately weakening the earthquake design provsions from the national model building codes as they are adopted into Oregon.
I believe that under former AG Hardy Myers, the interpretation of the Oregon public meetings law has been also deliberately weakened: so that state agencies and Commissions are now having meetings "in secret" to avoid not only public scrutiny, but also the keeping of minutes and any documents which should be considered public records--but these records are not accessible without a lawsuit against the offending entity.
James
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It seems germane to the conversation that OHSU, as a public entity, has a long history of keeping Oregonians in the dark about what their scientists are doing with taxpayer dollars. I work for In Defense of Animals and we have been forced to sue OHSU twice to get documents about their primate research at their Oregon National Primate Research Center in Hillsboro, where they house more than 4,000 monkeys used for invasive experiments.
One such suit ultimately caused an eight-year delay in getting the health and behavior records for the monkeys, and in the end the judge made it clear those documents should have been made public at our initial request.
Now OHSU has successfully lobbied Salem lawmakers and weakened public record law (HB 3094 http://www.aclu-or.org/content/free-speech-0) to apply singularly to their institution, making it more difficult for watchdog organizations to get information and find out what is happening with public money.
I would be curious to know if this new Government Transparency Counsel will do anything to make OHSU more accountable to the public.
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Well, "Think Out Loud" and A.G. Kroger were a bust today. They spent almost an hour being politic, and saying very little that would help the public get information. But then the laws are a whole lot more about presenting the image of transparency and citizen access, than they are about bringing it to fruition and actual practice. Hope springs eternal. The one silver lining on that front is that at east the AG, under pressure from a university professor (Bill Harbaugh, who had already posted it), put the old $25.00 "blue book," the Attorney General's Public Records and Meetings Manual, online.
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I can’t speak from experience in dealing with state agencies on public record requests, but I can speak from experience as a public lawyer who has handled quite a few public record requests for local governments.
Public record requests of Oregon local governments were mentioned only in passing and not well explained. The AG has no role in reviewing public record requests for local public bodies. When a local government claims that a record or part of a record is exempt from disclosure under the law, the requestor may seek review by the local DA. If the DA upholds the exemption, or if the DA directs that the record be released and the local agency still refuses, the person seeking the record may file a suit in the circuit court. In my experience, such court challenges are rare, even though a person who is successful can recover attorney fees and costs in the lawsuit.
The 2005 Legislature changed the law to require that the custodian of the records must, among other things, “respond as soon as practicable and without unreasonable delay,” although that response may initially be to confirm that the records exist and give an estimate of the time and fees required to make them available. There are very good reasons for this. It strikes a balance the legislature thought fair between the requestor’s interest in getting prompt access and the public body’s interest in avoiding undue hardship and expense. In my experience, most requests are handled promptly and without hassle. There are, however, a small number of requests that seek a large volume of documents, require extensive effort to gather from various departments and officials, or seek documents that must be reviewed to redact sensitive material exempt from disclosure under the law.
Oregon’s public records law represents a constant process of revision. Since 1973, ORS 192.440 (the procedure for getting access to public records) has been amended six times, most recently in 2007. The statutes creating exemptions from public disclosure (ORS 192.501 and 192.502) have been amended in every regular session except 1997. I have no doubt that process will continue as Oregonians fine-tune the tension between the public interest in knowing how government is doing public business, and the need for government to do that business efficiently and economically.
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Jeff Mapes has a good story on this show, here.
Quoting,
...
Kroger, appearing on OPB's "Think Out Loud" on Monday, played down his authority to order agencies to do anything when it comes to public records:
"Well, we are the legal adviser...In many cases I won't be able to order a state agency to release something. All I can do is tell them whether under the law whether we believe it should be released or not. In some cases, they may have a very solid argument for not releasing something that frankly I would prefer as a policy matter to release, so ultimately, I don't control the system." [This portion of the interview begins at about 15:40 mark.]
In fact, as the Attorney General's Public Records and Meetings Manual makes clear, people who request public records can appeal an agency denial to the attorney general, who "acts not as legal counsel for state agencies, but in a quasi-judicial role."
The manual adds that, "If the Attorney General orders the agency to disclose the record, the agency must comply with the order in full within seven days" or appeal the AG's order in court....
Bill Harbaugh
http://openuporegon.com
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I live in a city here in Oregon, I have been doing a research on the cities public works, WWTP, grit remover system, I started this over a year ago and every time it felt like, I had to file a petition, because the city would not give me this public records, I filed letters of my request, because verbal request did not work, I filed petitions through the county district attorney, and the district attorney's office would have to send the city a letter asking for these public records, I asked for invoices of work being done by a electric company at the WWTP, I knew that the city recorder was not providing the district attorney with all of the invoices. The rewiring of a grit remover motor was being done by an city employee, this was stated on maintenance records that the public works had kept, I submitted this petition back in June of 2009 and the district attorney office submitted their letter in July of 2009, and they got some invoices, but none of them I was looking for, I tried again in August of 2009 and only got one invoice, and this one was the right one. I received the right invoices in December of 2009 from the city recorder, but I submitted another letter to the district attorney in January of 2010, I told the district attorney's office about the invoice and no payment made to the electric company and this was a fake invoice and it was made up to please me. I received the right invoice in February of 2010, I received these from the district attorney's office. I have been looking for the Oregon law that states something about a city employee providing fake documentation to a citizen? I have the copy of the invoice, the total amount was never paid, I have a copy of the Transaction List by Date for the month of June of 2009, I was told by the public works director back in December of 2009 that this was made up just for me and it was paid by the city, wrong, never paid for. I have written a letter to the Sheriff's Office, as the district attorney's office stated; If I feel that a crime has been committed, then you must report that to law enforcement, I have been researching if a law has been committed, I am just going to have law enforcement look into to this for me, I am writing the attorney's generals office about this and have them look into to this also. Does anyone know what law has been broken?
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Comments are now closed.
In August I submitted a FOIA request to the EPA, which is now being delayed by Oregon DEQ, so I can say from personal experience how very difficult it is for citizens to access government records. When I initially asked the Oregon Attorney General's office for help, they were at first supportive. But when they became aware that some of Oregon's public agencies might be involved, they withdrew their support. The primary concern of that office, as explained to me by a public servant, is to protect those state agencies; it is not to provide transparency to Oregon's citizens. The mechanics of achieving transparency are needlessly intricate and bureaucratic because they are designed to protect government officials from accountability to citizens who might find some malfeasance in their handling of public business. By the way, Senators Wyden and Merkley and Congressmen Wu and Blumenauer came to my support for a more open and transparent government, but my experience with Oregon government makes me wonder whether local and state agencies will really be forthcoming with the information they possess.
Jerry Cressa