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President Barack Obama was elected promising more transparency in government; fewer secrets and backroom deals. Locally though, it looks like the blinds are being drawn. While newspapers that report on government are closing down and watchdogs disappearing, the government itself is proposing changes that would make it harder to get at public information.
Some Northwest leaders, unlike Obama, appear to be regressing in the area of open government. The Washington State Legislature is considering legislation so broad that, in defiance of Washington’s Public Disclosure Act, it would ask those who request information to prove why they need it, and what they will do with it. While the legislation is proposed to solve a serious problem, it would provide the excuse to tell the public that our government is none of our business.
It isn't just a state-level issue. The Seattle City Council has created the Open Government Committee, which sounds like an exercise in transparency, but is not. It has, in fact, proposed changes that would hamper access to public information.
Interesting in itself, the city's legislation was created in secret with no draft available for public review before release. While the announcements of the new committee gave the impression they were to enhance transparency their first proposed legislation (Council Bill 116476) does just the opposite. Paraphrased it says, if it takes us too much time to find the information, we don’t have to supply it.
Finding information quickly requires an index and Seattle’s bill takes advantage of a small provision in Washington’s landmark public-disclosure law. The law, RCW 42.56.070, provides that if maintaining such an index is unduly burdensome or would interfere with city operations, a city is not required to maintain one.
The Council committee is hearing from some city staffers that the work of providing information to the public is just too much trouble, and it takes too much time to keep an index. These things keep them from, they say, doing more important work. Regardless of the accuracy of that claim, it's important to remember that the exemption to the Public Disclosure Act was intended to address some unusual and infrequent cases where cities failed to keep records in such a way that information from them could be recovered easily.
To address that very problem, Washington’s State Archivist Jerry Handfield travels the state with a watchdog group called the Washington Coalition of Open Government (WCOG) to teach cities how to comply with Washington’s disclosure law. (WCOG's members are judges, media types and government officials, along with ordinary citizens.) Handfield teaches the reasonable theory that government can much more easily and inexpensively respond to public information requests by making certain a good index of the information exists.
Council Bill 116476 includes language that does the opposite of what the state archivist suggests. It says the city is "not required to maintain a current index of public records due to findings of the City Council that the requirement is unduly burdensome and would interfere with City operations and such a list is nearly impossible to create and/or maintain."
Now, it has to be asked: What does it take to create an index? In some city departments, they already exist. In the Council’s own legislative department, former employee Ernie Dornfeld and staff created a searchable index for all of the city's legislation past and present. Any legislation can be searched by any citizen, any time, online. While not all city departments have stepped up to the obvious need to create such an online resource, they clearly could start now keeping indexes of all new records. Except that this bill would prevent even that.
The traditional advocates of public access — newspapers — are losing their ability to fight this battle, which takes time, money and column inches. These changes also put a greater burden on the remaining providers of news which have fewer resources, such as smaller media outlets, blogs and citizen-supported publications.
Seattle’s proposed legislation is nothing more than an excuse to deny a legitimate request because it's too much work to reveal the truth.
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Comments:
Posted Fri, Mar 20, 11:22 p.m. Inappropriate
I support public disclosure law, open government, and an investigate press. In theory it all sounds good. But from past work I found that public disclosure is most often abused by a few nutjobs and cranks who use it as a tool to harass public agencies or elected officials. It is time-consuming and costly to the taxpayer and diverts resources from real work. The overwhelming majority of information provided never went to newspapers or served any greater public interest - it simply satisfied some individual's desire to get attention and feel important, or bother the government. Here is my private-sector analogy to the actual use and effects of RCW 42.56: Suppose the state passed a law that coffee needs to be safe, and everyone should know that their beverage is poured into a clean cup. Sounds good. As enacted, however, the law grants anyone the right to walk into a Starbucks at any time of day and demand that the baristas hand each individual cup in the store to you, so that you could inspect it and tear it up without explanation. Then you can leave without buying a drink. Imagine what this does to the store's productivity, to employee morale, and to the cost of a latte.
Posted Sat, Mar 21, 9:03 a.m. Inappropriate
If abuse of public disclose is a problem, address the problem of abuse. But this is not about abuse, but about general disdain and self-righteousness, as illustrated by TypeOne: "It is time-consuming and costly to the taxpayer and diverts resources from real work...it simply satisfied some individual's desire to get attention and feel important, or bother the government." Notice how "real-work" is distinguished from busy-work justified solely by casting the public in a bad light. The ethic of service and professionalism is increasingly scarce in our public servants, and instead infantile and adolescent recriminations are foist upon the public-at-large by means of administrative authority. The incentive to park one's ass, do one's time, and collect one's reward is largely to blame. Rather than derive a positive sense of self through service, hard work, and professionalism, a positive sense of self is derived through entitlement, a sense of importance, and the exercise of administrative powers.
Posted Sat, Mar 21, 7:18 p.m. Inappropriate
Not sure how you inferred all that from my comment, Gregory. Your generalizations are interesting, yet off-topic.
Posted Sat, Mar 21, 10:53 p.m. Inappropriate
TypeOne, I have to agree with Mr Wade on this one. I have used FOIA requests, and found the information valuable even if I never published what I found in a newspaper article. That information did get passed on to other interested people in the Seattle Community to use as they saw fit. I certainly never intended to harrass a govt. employee by making a request for information I could access no other way. Neither did I get any kind of ego boost or feeling of self importance out of it. Again, as Mr. Wade noted, if you have individuals who do use it to harrass, deal with them separately. It is inappropriate to live off public money, but feel so superior to those same tax payers that one can't deign to supply simple information when asked to. Note the Seattle Times article this week on the strange actions of SDOT. Had they no access to those logs and other information, Seattle residents would have no idea of how loosely run SDOT was during the snows of Decemebr. Knowledge is power, and sunshine is the best sanitizer.
Posted Sun, Mar 22, 4:05 a.m. Inappropriate
I am speaking of my past personal experience responding to information requests, and I spoke of "a majority" of requests are "most often" unnecessary and abusive. I stand by that, and my opinion about the persons who file them. Certainly not everyone is out to use public disclosure to be a nuisance, and I am only guessing at the motives of those who filed repeated wasteful requests. It appears from the proposed legislation that the City of Seattle shares that experience. I am glad to hear that you used the Public Disclosure law for its intended purpose, and yes, I read how the Times retrieved some information on the snow response. I wish news sources and taxpayers did more research and investigation to keep an eye on government, in fact. Regardless of the amount of legwork involved in responding, it was nice to receive a clear information request from a reasonable person who used the information, even if it was simply to satisfy curiosity about a topic. Officials were happy to help those requesters, and were not arrogant, self-righteous or feeling superior, in my experience. Many were happy to see that someone was interested in their work and would offer to personally answer questions or help interpret a technical document.
I think we all agree that state law needs to change so that the harasment can stop.
Posted Sun, Mar 22, 8:45 a.m. Inappropriate
Type-one, my inferences are derived from 8 years with the Federal Government, and 9 for King County--I'm now self-employed--and by reading your comment. I've shown my work, if you will, by pointing out exactly where I see your position as flawed. Whereas you dismiss me as off-topic, and then proceed to confirm my very point in response to Walker. I'm talking about a culture that goes to the heart of the issue, and frankly, informs your attitude. I also believe that people tend to behave exactly how you expect them to behave. Lose the expectations; maybe you'll be surprised.
Posted Sun, Mar 22, 2:15 p.m. Inappropriate
Citizens working to improve government, protect our environment or consumers, prevent abuse fo government funds and contracts (or even to find out if the Mayor and SDOT knew why roads were not plowed), or to be involved in decisions facing their neighborhoods,face an increasing mountain of obstacles to simply see PUBLIC RECORDS. Without access to these records, informed involvement is impossible.
For Seattle and King County, as well as for state agencies, a recent effort to review agencies' willingness to provide timely access to records found appalling response rates and resistance.
Agencies often drag out disclosure in order to have pending comment periods end before providing citizens and citizen groups with relevant records that would strengthen their comments.
Agencies often charge up front costs for providing each page - and inflate costs to discourage disclosure by: a) including hundreds of pages that were not immediately relevantto the request; and, b) charging far more thatn the actual cost of copies.
We have requests for records from MAY, 2008 which have still lnot been responded to.
For a decade things were improving in local public records disclosure. Now, the pendulum has swung with agencies arguing in court for the right to SUE the requester, agencies stalling on disclosure in order to allow third parties time to go to court for ex-parte orders enjoining disclosure (in which the citizen or reporter requesting the records never gets notice or the chance to argue for disclosure before the court commissioner or judge who acts on a petition filed by a company or entity that does not want records released;or, records withheld because the agency "cc'd" an attroney and sweeps the records under the rug of attorney-client privilege or work product.
Let's insist that this new Committee created by Council Pres. Conlin consider and address the obstacles to openness faced by citizens and the media in Seattle. Urge that the committee hear real-life experience of citizens, reporters and groups seeking records during a comment period. Let's consider the record of denial citing attorney-client privilege even where there is NO pending or threatened legal controversy.
Posted Sun, Mar 22, 7:52 p.m. Inappropriate
As a candidate for City Council and at the risk of sounding like a grandstander, I must say that this kind of legislation is all wrong. If it is too much work or money to keep government accessible to the public then the government needs to focus on how to make the process more efficient as opposed to making it go away.
The City Council is the ground floor of government. It is where the citizenry has the chance to get involved in the public process. But Seattle's vaunted public process has become a myth. And that fact needs to be exposed.
I have worked for over 12 years as an activist to see that Magnuson Park provides a balanced use to the public. Our group would work for months holding public meetings, taking polls, gathering public input and haggling amongst ourselves to arrive at an agreed solution only to have a city staffer unilaterally step all over our decision. If we are disallowed access to city records regarding our situation then what is the point of even trying to do what we think is the right thing?
This legislation that suggests blowing off the process of providing information to the public strikes me as simply lazy. We live in an information age. Database indexes are generally created by the DBMS itself based on key words. The City of Seattle has a gargantuan IT staff in place and Job #1 should be keeping government responsible to the people. Too much trouble to provide us with information? Cut me some slack.
-Rusty Williams
Posted Sun, Mar 22, 10:09 p.m. Inappropriate
Too much work to create and use an index? Not a credible position in this digital age. I'm sure Google could be configured to generate useful and functional indices with just a few keystrokes.
What's the REAL agenda here, City Council????????
Posted Mon, Mar 23, 4:46 a.m. Inappropriate
Efficient acces to information is a measure of a functioning government. The answer is easy, simply go all electronic for all decisions. This can be searched by google, at a cost less than a photocopy.
Senior public records staff are useful - as educators about how to use the system. Junior folks can certainly still be transferred to other administrative functions.
As for TypeOne - his opinion is part of a complex of techniques used to passive aggressively destroy accountability in government and large corporations - Enron is an example of the result.
As is the current 'bipartisan' ponzi scheme being run against the U.S. Treasury by NYC and Wash D.C, against my generation.
There will be no recovery until these folks fail absolutely - rhetorically thrown into the gutter which they use to threaten those that would hold them accountable. Dead or Alive.
Type One, we will be able to subpoena the corporate records of Crosscut and find out who you are.
If you don't like accountability, you are free to leave the country, or if you wish, take your right to bear arms and remove yourself from the planet.
Either that or pay off the U.S. deficit - big shot scum bag.
-Douglas Tooley
http://motleytools.com/blog
Posted Tue, Mar 24, 8:03 a.m. Inappropriate
TypeOne made a valid point based on his years of experience. The responses by Wade, Walker and especially Tooley take his words totally out of context, misrepresent his statements and are way out of line.
It's well-known that there ARE many nutjobs who make wild, unreasonable requests that take up inordinate amounts of staff time unnecessarily and abuse the system. As a taxpayer I resent that, and you should too. And those are the people TypeOne was referring to, not journalists and others with legitimate concerns.
Of course, the problem is that you can't arbitrarily declare who's a nutjob and who isn't, so we're stuck paying for all of it. But to somehow twist that as an indictment of TypeOne and his work ethic is off-base and absurd.
Posted Tue, Mar 24, 9:27 p.m. Inappropriate
Let me get this straight bigyaz. You are not indicting those indicting TypeOne are you? And you are not suggesting that interested citizens be priced and timed out of learning what our employees are doing and thinking on our behalf are you? So what are you saying? I am serious.
Posted Wed, Mar 25, 9:09 a.m. Inappropriate
I may be mistaken, but government employees work for us - the taxpayers. They are carrying out tasks that we have agreed are needed to support our communities, programs, etc. Requesting information - our information - should not be considered harassment, even if it's a request from a "frequent asker."
Further north of King County, we are experiencing a staff person that feels it's his "job" to screen the comments that taxpayers make in writing to our Commissioners! How's that for closing down government?
Bigyaz - I would bet the percentage of "nutjobs" in government employ is roughly the same as without...
Posted Thu, Apr 2, 12:12 p.m. Inappropriate
The voters re-elected the governor who has continued to spend more each year even though she has placed our state into near-bankruptcy. We continue to re-elect senators who embrace illegal aliens. We continued to approve Sims who took many traditional general expense items- like the maintenance of parks- out of the budget to fund other items and require added funding to maintain our parks.
The list goes on and on- what does it matter? We continue to approve of these scumbags.