PaPer Weight - Association of Washington Cities

Transcription

the Association of Washington CIties Magazine
Paper
Weight
Heavy records requests push
cities to seek solutions
jan/ feb 2011
www.awcnet.org
AWC Employee Benefit Trust
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On the web: awcnet.org/strength.aspx
FROM THE PRESIDENT
CITYVISION MAGAZINE VOL.3 NO.1
ASSOCIATION OF
WASHINGTON CITIES
President
Kathy R. Turner
Mayor, Puyallup
Vice President
Nancy McLaughlin
Councilmember, Spokane
Secretary
Don Gerend
Mayor, Sammamish
Immediate Past President
Glenn Johnson
Mayor, Pullman
Past President
Chuck Johnson
Councilmember, East
Wenatchee
AWC Chief
Executive Officer
Mike McCarty
AWC BOARD
OF DIRECTORS
John Caulfield
WCMA President
City Manager
Mountlake Terrace
Norm Childress
Mayor, Grandview
Jerry Cummins
Councilmember
Walla Walla
Jake Fey
Councilmember, Tacoma
Rebecca Francik
Councilmember, Pasco
Craig George
Mayor, Dayton
Jean Godden
Councilmember, Seattle
Bob Goedde
Mayor, Chelan
CITYVISION STAFF
Jim Haggerton
Mayor, Tukwila
Editor
Michelle Harvey
Micki Harnois
Mayor, Rockford
Associate Editor
Kate Cherrington
Advertising Coordinator
DeAnn Hartman
Marketing &
Communications Manager
Ron Rice
Published in
conjunction with
SagaCity Media Inc.
Publisher & President
Nicole Vogel
Jeanne Harris
Councilmember, Vancouver
Joe Marine
Mayor, Mukilteo
Beth Munns
Councilmember
Oak Harbor
Tom Rasmussen
Councilmember, Seattle
Paul Roberts
Council President, Everett
Advertising Director
Jeff Adams
John Sherman
WCMA Past President
City Supervisor, Pullman
Advertising Sales
Dean Desilet
Ed Stern
Councilmember, Poulsbo
Editorial Director
Bill Hutfilz
James R. Valentine
Councilmember, Eatonville
Art Director
Samantha Gardner
Contributing Artists
Daniel Berman,
Kai-Huei Yau
Production Manager
Mary Bradford
Chief Financial Officer
Nancy J. Mitchell
Mary Verner
Mayor, Spokane
Association of
Washington Cities Inc.
1076 Franklin St. SE
Olympia, WA 98501
360-753-4137
1-800-562-8981
Fax: 360-753-0149
www.awcnet.org
Our city staffs know all about public records
requests. They handle them daily, with constant
attention to transparency and efficiency. Frequently enough, however, these requests can
be unclear (we’re not sure what the requestor
wants) and can put heavy demands on
staff time, making the process extremely costly in terms of both money and
resources.
This is an issue that our peers serving
on AWC’s Legislative Committee ranked
as one of the association’s top legislative
priorities for 2011. The goal is to pursue
proactive public records proposals that
address some of the problems that come
with the recent surge in public records
requests.
Washington cities recognize that at
its best, the Public Records Act is all
about citizens and governments working together to make local government
transparent, because the information that
we use and generate belongs to the citizens. But in practice, many cities—large
and small—are being buried by records
requests, often coming from just a few
abusive requestors.
The stories can be notorious (see “Broken Records” in this issue for a couple of the worst). A single requestor can
inundate city clerks with unlimited requests; cities charge no more than
15 cents a copy to produce records, but requestors may not even pick up
requested items and may refuse to pay; legal staff can be overwhelmed with
review of e-mails and documents for necessary redactions. As our committee discussed possible remedies, the goals that emerged were appropriate
cost recovery, the opportunity to meet and confer with requestors so that
we understand what they are looking for, and the need to modernize a law
that was written for a paper-based society.
As we move forward discussing solutions, we all agree that we want to
develop a culture that promotes reaching out to citizens beyond just public
records. Cities want to provide our citizens with any and all information
they request in a timely manner. We just need to revise the system so that
we don’t jeopardize resources needed for other essential services.
CITIES WANT
TO REACH OUT
TO CITIZENS
BEYOND PUBLIC
RECORDS.
Kathy R. Turner
Mayor of Puyallup
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2011
CIT Y VISION MAGAZINE
1
1/2.11
Contents
Shoreline Mayor
Keith McGlashan
FEATURE
Welcome note
CityBeat
1
5
In this issue, we highlight public
records solutions ranging from
personnel to technology to resource
sharing. And in our popular NOTED
feature, we pour some thought into the
prospect of liquor store privatization.
2
CITY VISION MAGAZINE
Broken Records
14
The commitment to openness and
engagement that lies behind the Public
Records Act couldn’t be more in line
with Washington cities’ priorities. But
without changes in the law to prevent
systemic abuses, handling records
requests can sap precious resources that
cities need to provide other essential
services. By Ted Katauskas
CityWise
21
CityScape
28
Expert perspectives on circumspect
e-mailing, both sides of public records,
and meddling metadata. Plus, a
grassroots visioning effort snags an
AWC Municipal Excellence Award.
The format may change, but the
common ground of records remains.
PHOTOGRAPH BY DANIEL BERMAN
Moving Communities
CleanScapes is the trusted partner for communities seeking to
enhance residential & commercial vitality by providing innovative
streetscape maintenance, recycling & solid waste services.
www.cleanscapes.com
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Seattle: (206) 447-7000
Wenatchee: (509) 662-1954
www.omwlaw.com
Smiling just got a little easier:
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Maximize the power of your group and take advantage
of this opportunity and your group benefit discount
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The first 10 visitors to www.awcnet.org/
promotions.aspx for information about
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800-562-8981
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CITYBEAT
CITY
INSIDE:
NOTED A primer on liquor
store privatization
THE QUESTION The true cost
of public records requests
CALENDAR A new year means
new focus on legislative action
A
Record Holder
A dedicated expert helps
Olympia set a public
records standard.
A LITTLE MORE than three years ago,
the City of Olympia, like many Washington municipalities, found itself deluged
with public records requests. Almost
every day, journalists, homeowners,
activists, and the occasional crank filed
a records request form with the city
clerk, who assigned it to a records system administrator overwhelmed by the
sheer volume of information requested
and the lack of a system to track it all.
Because with digital data, a request
that might appear reasonable—say, a
self-appointed government watchdog
with a blog seeking to review e-mails
sent to and from the mayor—might
result in tens of thousands of electronic
records. That’s the equivalent of a million or more physical pages, enough
paper to fill the state capitol from floor
to dome. Multiply that by 185—the
number of public records requests filed
by citizens in Olympia in 2007—and the
city manager and council realized they
had to act to prevent the machinery of
city government from grinding to a halt.
continued on page 10
So in 2008,
JANUARY/FEBRUARY
JANUARY/
JANUARY
JANUAR
Y/
Y
/ FEBRUARY 2011
5
FRESH IDEA
Digital Domain
Tacoma saves time and money by posting requested records
on its website.
OVERSIZE E-MAILS can literally crash
inboxes; printing out hundreds of pieces of paper symbolically fells trees. So
the City of Tacoma devised an ingenious
way to handle large records requests: it
simply e-mails the requestor a link to a
section on the city’s website that hosts
all such requests. Better still, since the
city doesn’t have to print documents or
burn them to a CD, it can offer this service for free.
“This process allows us to reach more
people,” says Wendy Fowler, Tacoma’s
public records management supervisor.
Mindful of the Public Records Act, the
city monitors what it posts and keeps
a running database of who requested
documents and what they requested.
To address privacy concerns, documents are posted numerically without
the requestor’s name or what they are
requesting.
“It is actually available to everyone
6
who browses this section of our website,” says Doris Sorum, city clerk. “So
potentially, people could look at other
requests, but there’s no harm in that
since they are public records.”
And the setup is ideal when several
people are asking for the same records,
‘This process
allows us to reach
more people.’
Sorum adds. “We can give them the link,
and the documents are already out there
for anyone who wants to see them. It
came in handy when the Atlas tanker
blew up in the Nalley Valley—we could
just send people the link to see them.”
Tacoma was able to start sending
public records this way because of
the passage of one of AWC’s legislative priorities last session (Senate Bill
6367). The bill allows cities to direct
requestors to an Internet address
where the records can be found on
the city’s website, hosted by a city
server. As a result, Tacoma is saving
in copying and printing, although the
city will still produce CDs and printouts for requestors lacking the technological capacity.
The only glitches the city has
encountered so far have come when
technology does not want to cooperate. “There will be times when
there are server issues,” Fowler says.
“Some of our files have been 111.8
megabytes. You need a system that
can handle that size of file.”
Still, the online approach to fulfilling
records requests has won many fans.
“All the feedback we’ve had has been
overwhelmingly positive,” Fowler
asserts. “And when we’ve had requestors from Oregon and other states, this
truly speeds up the process.”
For more information:
www.cityoftacoma.org
TOOLKIT
Past Port
The Question
How is the time spent fulfilling public records requests
affecting your community?
Public records go historic in
Port Angeles.
YOU KNOW THE SAYING: What happens in Port Angeles, stays in Port
Angeles. Except that now anyone can
be privy to council packets, zoning
maps, and resolutions dating as far
back as the late 1800s.
Over the past two years, Port Angeles has used a grant from the state
archives office (www.sos.wa.gov/
archives/lrgp2009-11.aspx) to populate its existing Laserfiche system
with archival material. The city turned
over its old, fragile documents to the
state archives office for scanning and
safekeeping, and in return received its
records back ready for posting.
“We want to make as many of
the records available to the public as possible,” says Janessa Hurd,
Port Angeles city clerk. “Without the
grant, it would have taken us years
to whittle down the scanning.”
The city has also worked to preserve its present, upgrading software
so that it can break apart city council
meetings by agenda items. Members
of the public can now use the Laserfiche system to listen to the parts of a
meeting they are interested in, instead
of the whole thing. And Port Angeles
staff are happy to help people navigate the city’s website for information.
“I think a lot of people who frequently request records get confused between getting information
and actually requesting a record,”
says Hurd. “If we continue to educate
citizens and allow them to access as
much information as possible on our
website, requests should go down.”
Now that’s a gamble well worth
taking.
PETE KMET
Mayor, Tumwater
CLAIRE LIDER
City Clerk/Civil Service Examiner, Battle Ground
Our one staffer dedicated to handling
records requests has to spend several
hours a week going through lengthy
e-mails looking for obscure information
requests so we don’t violate the law. It’s a
waste of resources that could be used to
provide much-needed services.
All of the essential services of the city are
still provided¸ but in order to maintain
these services while producing records
requests, the city may utilize overtime and
employ other staff members. The true
cost of the request is not passed through
to the requestor.
DAVID HUTCHINSON
Mayor, Lake Forest Park
ARLENE FISHER
City Administrator, Cheney
Although we are keeping up with the
requirements of public disclosure, it is
creating backlogs in other areas. We are
slower in responding to other requests,
slower in keeping up with archive
requirements, and slower in keeping up
with the records maintenance in general.
About 20% of our records requests have
to do with permits, platting, utilities, fire
response, e-mails, and copies of invoices.
One clerk devotes 90% of her time to
processing, reviewing, redacting, and
releasing mostly these records, leaving
little time for her regular clerk duties.
Record Revolution
Public records used to consist of
printed letters, documents, and resolutions. But with electronic media, the
types and formats of public records
have multiplied many times over,
including all of these:
Emails
Spreadsheets
Calendars
Photographs
Videos &
MP3s
Voicemails
Social
Media
Word Documents
w
ww
Websites
7
CITYBEAT
NOTED
The Privatization of Liquor:
Six City Principles
Cities recognize there will be continued debate about the privatization of liquor sales in Washington State. Safe and financially sound
cities need careful siting of liquor stores and reliable revenues. AWC
encourages the Legislature to consider the following city principles:
1. Prevent loss of funding to cities and counties through reliable
continuation or replacement of liquor proceeds.
2. Provide for reliable funding of the Municipal Research and Services Center, currently financed by liquor proceeds.
3. Ensure orderly, well-planned implementation.
4. Ensure resources for an appropriate level of enforcement.
5. Provide for restrictions on licensing to ensure a reasonable
number of sites.
6. Provide authority for local government zoning control to prevent inappropriate locating of retail sites, e.g., near schools,
shelters, and treatment centers.
Prevent loss of funding to cities and counties
Since cities are responsible for policing liquor establishments but
preempted from taxing the state, a portion of liquor profits and taxes
are returned to cities to help defray policing costs. Local governments receive two types of revenue from liquor sales: liquor profits
and liquor taxes.
• Liquor board profits are revenues from permits, licenses, and
liquor store sales. The state first pays for the activities of the
Liquor Control Board (administration, sales people, leases, etc.),
and the remaining profits are divided 50% to the state, 40% to
cities, and 10% to counties (border areas receive an additional
distribution).
• Liquor excise taxes come from a state tax to consumers and
restaurant licensees. The tax rates include a basic rate plus
surcharges. Revenues from the basic rates of 15% for consumers and
10% for restaurants are shared 65% to the state, 28% to cities, and
7% to counties.
Provide reliable funding for the Municipal Research and Services Center
The Municipal Research and Services Center (MRSC) provides local government with professional consultation, research, and information
services and is highly valued by cities and counties throughout Washington State. MRSC receives almost all of its funding from a contract
with the state. The contract is funded through cities’ (76.7% of its
2011 budget) and counties’ (15.9%) share of liquor revenue. The city
share is paid out of city liquor profits, and the county share is paid
out of county liquor taxes.
Ensure orderly, well-planned implementation; an appropriate level of
enforcement; a reasonable number of sites; and appropriate locations.
Cities remain concerned about the potential for public safety impacts
with the privatization of liquor stores. Appropriate liquor enforcement reduces the availability of alcohol for minors and those already
intoxicated. Current enforcement is primarily supported by liquor
profits, and any privatization effort must maintain adequate enforcement funding. Additionally, licensing restrictions and city zoning
authority should be in place to provide for a reasonable number of
liquor outlets that are not near schools, treatment centers, and other
inappropriate locations.
www.awcnet.org
8
CALENDAR JANUARY/FEBRUARY
TRAINING
TRAINING
ESSENTIALS
CITY LEGISLATIVE ACTION
CONFERENCE
FEBRUARY 16–17
OLYMPIA
Tell us your city story; make your
voice heard. This is your chance to
convene in Olympia to meet with
your legislators, network with other
city officials, and receive critical
updates from AWC’s lobbyists.
LABOR RELATIONS FORUM:
GETTING ON THE SAME PAGE
FEBRUARY 17
OLYMPIA
Everyone at city hall plays a different
role in labor negotiations: council,
mayor, city executives, human
resources, and finance directors. Join
the discussion on how a collaborative and direct approach to labor
relations can make a lasting impact.
Hear about how to tackle this issue
holistically to avoid the domino effect contract settlements can have
on your comparable jurisdictions.
Breakout session for elected officials
and city staff.
RMSA LAND USE
FEBRUARY 17
DUPONT
Learn about effective land-use planning from comprehensive plan adoption through the issuance of permits
and appeals. Topics not addressed
in standard codes will be covered,
such as how to handle the open record hearing, appearance of fairness
doctrine, the vested rights doctrine,
and how to write legally sufficient
findings and conclusions. This is
your opportunity to find solutions to
specific land-use problems. Free for
RMSA members.
www.awcnet.org
Chelan
Poulsbo
Seattle
DuPont
Olympia
Zillah
Long Beach
FEBRUARY
JANUARY
16–17 City Legislative Action Conference
Olympia
17 Labor Relations Forum: Getting on the
Same Page Olympia
17 RMSA Land Use DuPont
20 Wellness Webinar
FESTIVALS
JANUARY
8 Beach Cleanup Day
Long Beach
8 Second Saturday Art
Walk Poulsbo
14–17 Lake Chelan
Winterfest Chelan; www.
lakechelanwinterfest.com
28–Feb 6 Children’s Film
Festival Seattle
www.nwfilmforum.org
FEBRUARY
19–21 Red Wine and
Chocolate Zillah
www.wineyakimavalley.org
9
Citybeat
Record Holder continued from page 5
World skills on your doorstep
Planning • Permitting • Compliance
Environmental remediation & restoration
Industrial hygiene • Geotechnical engineering
Natural & cultural resources
Supporting Washington cities from
10
Seattle
206.342.1760
Bothell
425.368.1000
Tacoma
253.572.0516
Lynnwood
425.921.4000
city vision magazine
January/February 2011
Olympia hired Amy Cleveland as the city’s first records
manager, the public records equivalent of an air traffic
controller. She has largely centralized records management in the clerk’s office, where she supervises a team
of two analysts and a records system administrator.
Together, they handle multidepartmental requests and
provide coordinated assistance to city employees in
other departments as they respond to requests.
“Amy is a can-do person who takes every opportunity
to better the city’s records processes, including encouraging good communication with requestors,” says assistant city attorney and risk manager Annaliese Harksen.
“To be good at public disclosure, you need to be good
at records management,” says Cleveland, a charter member of the Washington Association of Public Records
Officers (see “Broken Records,” p. 14). “The benefit you
get from good records management is not only good
public disclosure and compliance; what it does for work
flow is tremendous. You get a lot of return from just a
small investment.”
For example, the city pays a $7,400 annual fee to use
FOIA Systems, an off-the-shelf software package that
centralizes and tracks public records requests. Citizens
use dedicated accounts on the city’s website to submit
their requests, which are sent to an electronic queue
monitored by records staff. After reviewing a request—
and sometimes phoning the requestor to clarify what’s
being requested—records staff keys in instructions to
whichever department has the records being requested.
The records coordinator for that department reviews
the request, locates the files, and uploads them, recording how many hours were spent filling the request.
Records staff then zaps the material off to the requestor.
In 2010, this process happened 629 times in Olympia,
more than triple the number of requests the city had
handled without the system in place in 2007. All told, it
consumed more than 1,500 hours, or half a year’s worth
of eight-hour days, of city staff time. Even though these
numbers don’t include requests that are handled over
the counter and otherwise outside of the FOIA system,
there’s clearly a huge gain in efficiency.
“We’re doing everything we can with the resources we
have to give people the records they want,” Harksen says.
And that, aside from saving the city time and money,
really is the ultimate goal. After all, Harksen stresses,
these are the public’s records. —Ted Katauskas
www.olympiawa.gov
Citybeat
profile
Shoreline Mayor
Keith McGlashan
Meta
Mind
Shoreline Mayor Keith
McGlashan talks about
life behind a barber
chair, what elected officials need to know about
metadata, and how cities
can learn from O’Neill v.
City of Shoreline.
Photographs by daniel berman
Q&A
The city council appointed you mayor, but what was the path that led you
to work as a barber?
In my youth, I had a lot of little jobs and I was fed up with what to do with my life,
and my friend said, “Why don’t you go to beauty school?” I didn’t have anything else
to do, so I went and it ended up being a 30-year career.
Did you learn anything from cutting people’s hair that might apply to
city government?
Huh. I don’t think I’ve ever been asked that question. That’s a dang good question! In
the hair industry, we were always labeled as being a cheap shrink. People would just
tell you everything, and I think I’ve learned how to listen to people and their concerns. I think that carries over to this business.
january/ february 2011
11
Citybeat
Q&A
The main story in this issue of Cityvision looks at how
public records requests can affect cities. What was
your city’s experience before O’Neill v. Shoreline?
As far as I know, we followed the law, and everybody got what
they requested. We did the same even with this case. But this
case is showing that even a little request, like “I want a copy of
this e-mail,” can turn into something much bigger.
Like a lawsuit over metadata—in your case, not being
able to provide a specific copy of metadata associated
with an e-mail—that heads all the way to the Supreme
Court. How much has the suit cost the city?
It cost us nothing for our defense. But with the potential
awards of attorney fees if O’Neill prevails and daily penalties
dating from 2006, it could be substantial.
And it’s not as though the city has a pile of money
lying around for such purposes.
It’s the situation a lot of cities are going to find themselves in.
This metadata stuff can be pretty confusing. How do
you explain it?
When an e-mail is sent, it has this embedded information in it
that shows, for example, the path the e-mail took to reach an
inbox and the exact time—to the second—that it was sent and
received. Every time something happens to that e-mail, if it’s
forwarded or whatever, the metadata changes.
What do electeds need to understand about metadata?
You need someone on staff who knows how to track and maintain all of that changing metadata, that changing record. And
that person needs to know where to go to keep up to date
about the public records laws and find guidance about metadata, whether it comes from the Legislature or the courts.
How can the Legislature help?
We’ve been very timely with getting responses out to people, and we want to make sure we’re adhering to the Public
Records Act. I would like the Legislature to bring the act up to
date with current technology so it’s clearer to cities what we’re
supposed to be doing on our end.
Do you agree with the court’s decision?
The court’s decision made it sound like, in my own personal
opinion, that we purposely did something wrong, when in
reality we were following the state guidelines at the time and
providing the information that was being requested. That’s the
part that doesn’t sit well with me.
12
This case is showing that
even a little request can
turn into something
much bigger.
Has the court case affected city government’s standing
in the community?
It’s skating under the radar. We don’t have an actual newspaper in Shoreline anymore, but there are a few blogs and it’s
been out there. It’s such a confusing issue that most citizens
are looking at it and going, “I don’t understand all of this.”
We’re having trouble understanding all of this. I do believe our
community as a whole still trusts the government. Losing this
bit of metadata that neither the city nor the average citizen
uses hasn’t eroded confidence in Shoreline as an open
government. In the citizen satisfaction survey we just did,
our numbers are up over the previous year.
Another trust barometer might be voters’ recent
approval of the city’s request for a property tax levy.
We had a 73% turnout, and it passed by 56%. Pretty amazing,
considering our economic climate.
Ever want to trade the mayoral hot seat for your old
barber chair?
No. I like what I do. It’s challenging at times. I don’t like the
fact that Shoreline seems to be the test case for this one issue,
but once we get through it and every jurisdiction knows what
it needs to do about metadata, it may turn out that this was a
good thing for other cities. If our experience can prevent them
from having to go through what we went through, that could
be the silver lining.
By the Numbers
Cityvision looks at the
strong city data behind
the metadata sample case
of Shoreline.
All population data from the 2000 U.S. Census, unless otherwise indicated
Population
Levy Amount
Approved
2000
53,000
Total Shoreline residents
2010
54,500
Total Shoreline residents
$1.48
per $1,000
2011–2016
For public safety, parks & rec,
community services
source: city of shoreline
Ethnic Makeup
Ballot Booth Recap
61.8%
72.9%
56.5%
White
14.7%
Asian
8.9%
yes on property tax levy
Hispanic or
Latino (of
any race)
S&P Report Card
6.3%
Other
5.7%
turnout
Bond rating:
AA+
1.7%
Black/African Indian/Native
American
American
Financial
management
assessment:
Strong
State audits
last 10 years:
Clean
City Assessed
Value
Resident Approval
% of residents rating Shoreline as an excellent
or good place to live
2004
2006
89%
residential
11%
2008
87%
92%
93%
95%
2010
commercial
cit y vision magazine
13
FEATURE STORY
BROKEN
RECORDS
While it may work for radio stations, cities need
a different formula than all requests, all the time.
By Ted Katauskas
T
The City of Prosser’s chronic
Public Records Act hangover
began more than four years ago
with two empty wine barrels
and a naked blow-up doll.
As long as anybody in the present administration can
remember, Larry Loges, an irascible property owner
whose father was mayor of Zillah in the 1960s, has been a
very vocal and public critic of city government, using the
unapologetically downscale trailer parks he owns on both
sides of Wine Country Road, Prosser’s gentrifying main
arterial, as his personal soapbox. A dilapidated trailer on
his property served as a billboard, its boarded-up facade
spray-painted with often misspelled political graffiti
(“ARROGANCE, BIGOTORY, CORRUPTION”). Motorists exiting the freeway gawked at his reader boards,
especially the homemade (un)welcome sign mocking
the city motto (“PROSSER: AN UNPLEASANT PLACE
WITH UNPLEASANT PEOPLE”).
His feud with Prosser, long simmering, reached a rolling boil in September 2006. After then-mayor Linda Lusk
unveiled a proposal to promote local wineries by building
a water tower shaped like a wine glass, Loges hoisted two
wine barrels onto the roof of his trailer and, for effect,
lashed on a blow-up doll as a crude effigy of Lusk. Already
fielding complaints from the Chamber of Commerce
that Loges’s nose-thumbing at the city had been turn-
ing Prosser into “the laughingstock
of the Lower Valley,” the city administrator deemed the effigy an unpermitted sign in violation of municipal
public decency code and dispatched
police officers to tow away the trailer
and impound it.
“That’s the entryway into our
city,” explains Mayor Paul Warden,
who was then a councilmember.
“People were upset. He does these
things just to see how far he can go,
and if he thinks he can get away with it, he will. He makes
the community look bad.”
In response. Loges sent a letter to the council protesting that the city had “illegally removed [his] personal
property” and that he was being punished for making
a “political statement against the city administration.”
The city scheduled a hearing. And Loges started filing
public records requests.
At first, he requested just a few items: a copy of the police
report related to the impoundment, a list of city personnel
involved, and other related documents. But then the trickle
became a deluge. Loges filed 43 of the 54 public records
requests the city received in October and November that
year. In December, after receiving a water bill for one of his
trailer parks that he reckoned was more than three times
the usual amount, Loges spray-painted a public service
announcement (“√ YOUR WATER BILL”) on his trailer
(which by then he had towed back to its place) and began
requesting the utility bills of Prosser’s 4,838 residents,
seeking evidence that he was being overcharged.
Loges then began appearing in person at city hall practically every day, sometimes multiple times, in pursuit of
january/february 2011
cit y vision magazine
15
‘What hits me hardest
is when I think about
all of the things we
could accomplish if we
weren’t working on his
wild-goose chases.’
—CHARLIE BUSH, PROSSER CITY ADMINISTRATOR
thousands upon thousands of pages of documents, anything that
would help prove his contention that other property owners
weren’t being held to the same standards as he was. Sometimes
he made requests for his own records: in one notorious instance
chronicled in the Yakima Herald-Republic, Loges came to city
hall with a letter asking the clerk for a sign permit application—
which he could have grabbed from a rotating kiosk himself—then
minutes later returned and filed a public records request for his
original letter. Cathleen Koch, who was both finance director and
city clerk at the time, says there were days when she did nothing
but attend to Loges’s requests. Of the 198 general government
records requests filed in Prosser in 2007, 69 were filed by Loges
alone, requiring 52 working days of the city clerk’s time and nearly
as many from the city attorney to vet the requests, plus contributions from a half-dozen employees from various departments to
track down documents. That translates to about $75,000 worth
of payroll, or the equivalent of nearly a mile of new sidewalks.
Ultimately, to free up Koch to handle the city’s finances, the city
would spend $150,000 to recruit and hire a clerk and a deputy
clerk to stay on top of Loges’s unrelenting requests.
“It was overwhelming,” says Koch, now Prosser’s deputy city
administrator and finance director. “When it was time to do the
city’s annual report, it was like, do I get the annual report done
or Mr. Loges’s requests? I reasoned that it would be more costly
not to do the requests and get sued than it would be to get zapped
by the state auditor for not filing my report on time.”
But Loges sued anyway, in January 2007, alleging that the city
had delayed, denied, or improperly processed 44 of his original requests. In July 2009, nine months after Benton County
Superior Court Judge Cameron Mitchell ruled that the city had
improperly handled 11 of 22 requests, the city reached a settlement, paying Loges $175,000. That money came out of the city’s
general reserves, cutting Prosser’s fiscal safety net in half.
16
Charlie Bush and
Prosser have weathered
a deluge of records
requests.
“Mr. Loges has made it difficult for this city to function,” says
city administrator Charlie Bush, who notes that the city devotes
close to 4 percent of its general fund expenditures to Loges’s
requests. “What hits me hardest is when I think about all of the
things we could accomplish if we weren’t working on his wildgoose chases. Filing records requests is Larry Loges’s reason for
living. It’s his purpose in life.”
Loges sees it another way: “They’re just trying to embarrass
me. They’d like to see me leave the community. . . . It’s my right
as a citizen to ask for documents. All I’m asking for is compliance with the law.”
AND THAT LAW is a huge part of the problem. Washington’s
Public Records Act was groundbreaking at its origin and is universally praised by fans of good government. But as written, it creates
the conditions for struggles like Prosser’s across the state.
“I don’t want to be the Prosser model,” says Dennis Johnson, mayor of Wenatchee, where the city hall conference room
is off-limits to meetings for weeks at a time, filled as it is with
records that must be made available for inspection by requestors who don’t want to pay the 15-cent-per-page copy fee. “But
that prospect is always on the horizon. When the records act is
abused—and even when it’s not—it takes so much productivity
away from city employees.
“The dilemma is that you want to be transparent, but at the
same time you’re trying to manage the resources of the city, which
PHOTOGRAPH BY KAI-HUEI YAU
APP APOSTLE
Q&A WITH MAX OGDEN
are already stretched pretty thin. You can’t do that if you’re spending all of this time and money on records requests. There’s got to
be a happy medium. . . . It’s a concern of many municipalities.”
Such as the City of Yakima, which hired its first public records
officer in 2006 and now spends $500,000 a year processing
records requests. And Lakewood, whose city clerk responded
to nearly a thousand records requests in 2009, including a query
from a single requestor that yielded 65,000 pages of material (a
stack of paper 22 feet tall) and cost the city $15,000 to process, for
which the requestor, who ultimately was interested in only 500
of those pages, was charged $75. And the City of Sumner, which
last year marshaled no fewer than 17 employees who worked
over the course of several months to process two requests—
one seeking all records concerning the city’s sidewalks, yielding
8,000 pages of documents, and the other asking for all e-mails,
cell phone records, voice mails, and computer files on record for
four city officials, yielding 24,000 pages.
Washington’s Public Records Act dates to 1972, when a grassroots movement of political activists, in the shadow of the Watergate scandal, drafted Initiative Measure 276. In the 1972 voter’s
pamphlet, the measure’s official “statement for” begins, nobly,
“Our whole concept of democracy is based on an involved citizenry. Trust and confidence in government institutions is at an
all-time low. High on the list of causes of this citizen distrust are
secrecy in government and the influence of private money on
governmental decision-making. . . . Initiative 276 brings all of this
out into the open for citizens and voters to judge for themselves.”
That sounded reasonable to 72 percent of voters that year, the
share who approved the measure, which became known as the
Public Disclosure Law, one of the strongest open-government
laws in the nation.
But by making “all public records and documents in state
and local agencies available for public inspection and copying,”
the authors of the state’s original act couldn’t have foreseen the
burden that their law would create for cities in an age of e-mail
and digital records. Now, a request to review electronic correspondence can yield a million pages of documents and require
hundreds of hours of staff time to fulfill. Even subsequent revisions of the law—which was rechristened in 2005 as the Public
Records Act, or PRA—did little to ease the strain.
The intentions of the act’s authors are noble, says Everett
assistant city attorney Ramsey Ramerman, who helped found the
Washington Association of Public Records Officers, a statewide
organization dedicated to providing PRA education and promoting best practices to increase transparency and PRA compliance
for state, county, and local governments. But because the act is
so strong, he asserts, it can be used to place an untenable burden
on already financially strapped cities.
Portland-based web
developer and open data
guru Max Ogden talks
about how cities can
harness the power of the
web—for free—to put useful
digital government data
into the hands of citizens.
You’re best known for
helping create CivicApps.
How would you describe
CivicApps?
CivicApps (www.civicapps.
org) was the Portland metro
area’s regional data-release
program, part of an open
data initiative. It gives people like me raw access to
city data sets so we can
build civic applications that
make it easier for citizens
to get the most out of that
data.
As it pertains to government transparency, what’s
the big idea?
In terms of public records
requests, it’s much easier
to have a computer serve
someone than it is to have
a person sitting at the city
who has to answer phone
calls and do manual records
and archive work.
Is that how did CivicApps
got started?
It started on a city level.
Instead of just dealing
with these public records
requests on a case-by-case
basis, waiting for people to
ask for this stuff, the City of
Portland said, “Let’s see if
we can make it available and
get people to go to the data
instead of having the data
go through us.” That was
one of the goals. The other
major goal was to release
data so that citizens could
build interesting civic
applications based on those
statistics and facts.
What’s one example?
The city released a data set
of the locations of heritage
trees. A developer created
PDX Trees, an iPhone application that finds your position in relation to the nearest
heritage tree and gives the
whole back story behind
that tree. Because that app
worked so well, I got the
developer hooked up with
the director of the city’s
public art program, and he’s
using the same platform to
develop a similar application
for public art, with locations
and descriptions and links to
artists’ websites for all of the
art the city has purchased.
continued on page 19
17
Because the PRA places no limits on the number of records a person may request, a single
requestor can bring the machinery of government to a screeching halt, particularly in a city
hall staffed by one or two employees. The smallest cities are held to the same “strict compliance” standard as bigger cities that can afford
dedicated records request managers—and are
assessed the same maximum penalty of $100 per
day per request, an amount revised upward in a
1992 amendment to the act. And in a response
to a large request, even a seemingly insignificant
clerical error can generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills and fines.
Or as Ramerman put it in a white paper in
2009: “A handful of requestors from across the
state have started using the PRA as an incomeRamsey Ramerman helped found
the Washington Association of
generating tool. They attempt to trip up municiPublic Records Officers in part to
palities, not for the purpose of accessing records,
help cities stay transparent and
but for the primary purpose of generating
in compliance with the law.
mandatory penalties from state and local governments. . . . Washington’s PRA allows the law to
be abused at taxpayer expense. The abuse harms
transparency by wasting agency time and distracting agencies inadvertent errors, such as when two pages out of a thousand
from complying with good-faith requests and otherwise doing get stuck together in a copy machine.
And perhaps most critically, the second bill’s “cost recovery”
the public’s work.”
Ramerman’s solutions—included in two Public Records Act clause, modeled after provisions in other states, would provide
requestors with five hours of free search time per
request per month but then allow cities to recover
additional costs, which will promote reasonable
requests that don’t overwhelm a city’s staff with
sheer volume.
“Our Public Records Act is essential to having
a functioning democracy,” says Ramerman. “The
federal government has weak transparency laws
that make you think something’s kind of broken.
On the flip side, Washington has a very strong law
that puts a high burden on local government to give
—RAMSEY RAMERMAN, EVERETT ASSISTANT CITY ATTORNEY
full assistance to any requestor, with no limit on the
number of requests, and the cost to the requestor
reform bills to be considered by the Legislature this year—include is nil. . . . The huge weakness of the Public Records Act is that it
an AWC-backed “meet and confer” provision that would encour- can be abused by someone who has a grudge against government.
age requestors, before filing a suit, to meet with cities to address It’s a breeding ground for abuse.”
mistakes made in good faith; Attorney General Rob McKenna has
proposed a similar remedy that would only require requestors to
submit a written notice. Both versions of the provision address CASE IN POINT: Zink v. City of Mesa, which Ramerman repregames of “gotcha” that abusers play, taking advantage of the sented on appeal, a case that’s become a rallying cry for the need
act’s “strict compliance” mandate to collect enormous fines for for legislative reform of the Public Records Act.
‘Our Public Records Act is
essential to a functioning
democracy. ... The huge
weakness is that it can be a
breeding ground for abuse.’
18
PHOTOGRAPH BY DANIEL BERMAN
In August 2002, after the City
of Mesa voided a building permit on her fire-damaged home,
Donna Zink, who had served as
Mesa’s mayor in the early 1990s
and had been a councilmember as recently as 2001, began
spending a lot of time at city hall.
Only instead of governing, she
was submitting public records
requests, demanding phone and
fax logs and correspondence. In a
busy year, the tiny town of 440 in
the wheat fields of eastern Washington might receive 12 records
requests; over the next two and a
half years, Zink alone would file
172. For months, city clerk Teresa
Standridge says she spent half of
her time and an assistant spent
all of her time doing little else but
responding to Zink’s requests.
“She’d come in up to three or
four times a day with requests—not just one page, but hundreds
of pages—then she’d go home and think of something else she
could request,” says Standridge, who happens to be Zink’s sisterin-law. “If we didn’t do everything just perfect, she was on us all
the time. I was physically shaking every time I saw her because
I knew she was waiting for me to make a mistake. All through it
she threatened to sue the city. We were trying to do everything
she wanted, and we were trying to get our jobs done.”
To that end, Standridge limited Zink’s time to inspect records
to an hour a day.
In 2003, Zink and her husband filed a lawsuit, arguing that
the city had improperly redacted, denied, or failed to respond
to 37 requests. Initially, Franklin County Superior Court Judge
William Acey ruled in the city’s favor, finding that the city had
fulfilled its PRA obligation by acting in good faith, and that strict
compliance with the act was a “practical impossibility” for a city
of Mesa’s size, given the city’s limited resources. He also determined that Zink’s requests amounted to unlawful harassment,
an attempt “to make the city look bad.”
Zink appealed the decision, and in 2007, the Court of Appeals
overturned Acey’s ruling. In its opinion, the Appeals Court states,
“We do not doubt that the impact of the Zinks’ requests on the
clerk’s office was significant. . . . However . . . The reasonableness
of the city’s actions does not excuse noncompliance.” The case
was remanded to Acey, who imposed a fine that amounted to
So what’s the takeaway for
Washington cities?
It’s hard for cities to be
competitive in building
immersive user experiences
and applications that look
modern and make people
want to use them. What
cities are really good at is
compiling data. So why not
have the community come
in and help cities release the
data and present it in really
interesting ways?
What’s in it for developers?
That’s the interesting part.
Data from government agencies is unlicensed and in the
public domain, so developers are free to sell or charge
users a fee for applications
that interpret that unlicensed data. If you take the
time to make a really beautiful interface for government
data, legally there’s nothing
stopping you from building a
business around it.
How does a city that wants
to explore this sort of data
sharing get started?
There’s an initiative called
Civic Commons (www.civic
commons.com) that just
launched a few months ago,
started by the chief technical
officer of Washington, D.C.,
and a couple of nonprofits.
Together, they are maintaining a wiki that lists applications cities have developed
as part of their open data
initiatives. A wiki is a really
good resource because it
can host detailed descriptions of every city’s applications, including perspectives
on what kinds of hurdles
cities have had to overcome
and what worked for them.
The applications that the
City of Portland developed
are even on the wiki, so any
other city that wants to use
them can do so, instead of
having to pay a company to
develop them.
Do you have any simple
advice for electeds?
Get involved with Civic
Commons: find out what
other cities are doing and
whether there are any tools
that might fit your city. Adding your city to the Civic
Commons wiki is a huge
first step, because software
developers out there will see
that your city is interested. If
you’re a small rural city without an IT department but
you want to open your data
up to the public, you can
add your name to the Civic
Commons wiki right next
to Seattle or Philadelphia. It
doesn’t matter how big or
how small you are.
What’s the overarching
vision that drives you in this
work?
That people will know
what government is doing
because they have applications that can work through
all the madness and the
noise and tell us what’s relevant to every one of us
individually. Suddenly, your
government becomes more
relevant to you. That’s my
dream.
19
RECORDS
RESOURCE
With bills under consideration, court cases
ongoing, and rulings and regulations
constantly adjusting the public records
landscape, the state archives office has
taken a proactive approach to helping cities understand their obligations. At www.
sos.wa.gov/archives/RecordsManagement/
records_local.aspx, cities can sign up to
receive automatic updates and advice on
best practices for public records, as well as
access a wealth of up-to-date information
on topics including:
$559 per citizen—$246,000, or twice the city’s annual revenue
and a quarter of its entire general fund budget. Zink subsequently
appealed, arguing for the full penalty of $100 per day. While the
suit remains stuck in appellate court, the city continues to accrue
interest on the unpaid fine, already in excess of $50,000. Meanwhile, the city’s future is on hold; in April 2009, Mesa’s mayor
announced that the city was considering bankruptcy or disincorporation, then resigned a few months later.
“That’s still an option,” says David Ferguson, a door salesman
who took over the role of mayor after a 10-month vacancy because
nobody else wanted the job. “Everything’s on hold. If they don’t
like the ruling, they can appeal this all the way to the Supreme
Court. As mayor, I don’t see an end to the lawsuit.”
But the lawsuit may have a silver lining for other Washington cities: the Appeals Court ruling faulted Mesa for failing to
act on an obscure Public Records Act provision that helps cities
to “cope with records requests that become so time consuming
that other work is impacted” by allowing them “to adopt rules to
prevent . . . excessive interference with other essential functions
of the agency.” That situation certainly seemed to apply to the
City of Gold Bar, which spent $70,000—10 percent of its annual
revenue—on public records requests in 2010, requiring the city
to eliminate one public safety position, cut its office staff in half,
eliminate maintenance in public parks, limit snow removal, and
rely on citizens to “bring captured dogs to City Hall during office
hours for impoundment.”
After studying the Public Records Act and noticing the “excessive interference” provision, in November Gold Bar’s council
enacted Resolution 10-14, adopting a rule to devote no more
than 12 hours a month to the handling and processing of public records requests “in order not to interfere with essential
functions,” giving priority to the most manageable requests for
20
The basics of records
management
Educational and training
opportunities
Schedules for records
retention
Management of electronic records
Digital archiving
Records inventories
Disaster preparedness and response
The state archives’ local records
grant programs
easily retrieved documents.
It’s the first remedy of its kind in Washington. And it’s likely
to be challenged in court by open government activists. Mayor
Joe Beavers, who spends 20 hours a week himself processing
“litigation sensitive” records requests, sees the resolution as
only a stopgap solution.
“I should be planning for new sidewalks and culverts, coming up with a snow removal plan, working with businesses to
improve the business climate—all that doesn’t get done so I can
copy three-year-old e-mails onto DVDs. Every mayor in the
state of Washington needs to call up their representative and
their senator and say, ‘There are changes to the public records
proposed by the attorney general and AWC, and we need to get
those done this year.’ What’s at stake is your budget.”
If you doubt that, just ask the Benton County Clean Air Authority, which, after citing Larry Loges for failing to obtain an asbestos
removal permit for a trailer demolition, agreed to pay $30,000
to settle a lawsuit Loges filed in 2009 claiming that the county
hadn’t properly handled three requests he had filed related to
the citation. And then there’s Prosser. Loges, who has a civil suit
against Prosser pending in U.S. District Court and is still trying
to resolve his water bill, filed no fewer than 99 public records
requests in 2010, accounting for 73 percent of the requests filed
at city hall last year. City administrator Charlie Bush even met
with Loges over coffee to try to broker a truce, but he says Loges
wasn’t interested.
“He said to me, ‘I’m out to bankrupt the city,’” says Bush, a
comment Loges denies making. And if that result seems farfetched, just spend a day in David Ferguson’s shoes, wondering
whether his wheat-dependent town will succumb not to prolonged drought or to invasive pestilence, but to a citizen with a
public records scythe.
CITYWISE
22 CITY E-MAIL ESSENTIALS 23 SOCIAL MEDIA AND PUBLIC ACCESS
24 RETHINKING A COMMUNITY 25 MEETING THE DEMANDS OF METADATA
W hen in doubt, consider whether
you would be comfortable with
the entire e-mail being broadcast
on local television, radio, or other
news media.
legal |
21
CITYWISE
LEGAL AFFAIRS
ANGELA S. BELBECK, Ogden Murphy Wallace, PLLC
SENDING
THE RIGHT
MESSAGE
HOW TO AVOID UNINTENDED MEETINGS AND EMBARRASSING RECORDS
No e-Grets
A few simple guidelines can
help you use your city e-mail
account effectively.
Avoid e-mail exchanges that ultimately involve a quorum and discuss
city business.
Avoid use of “Reply All.” It may be
convenient, but it could trigger an
unintended quorum.
A councilmember may send an
informational e-mail to the governing
body. Make clear that a message is
informational only and that no
response is desired.
A councilmember may communicate by e-mail with staff as long as
the staff member contacted is not
acting as a conduit for communication to other councilmembers. Clarify
when communications are intended
for staff only.
In general, a councilmember may
send e-mails that do not relate to city
business. Be sure your agency e-mail
policy allows incidental personal use.
22
YOU’RE A COUNCILMEMBER watching the 11 o’clock news one evening, and you
learn about the state’s intent to make grant funds available for recreational projects.
Not surprisingly, your jurisdiction could really use some of those funds. You immediately share the good news by sending an e-mail to your fellow councilmembers, the
mayor, and your finance director. Several councilmembers reply to the entire group
on next steps to secure the funding.
Have you just participated in a meeting in violation of the Open Public Meetings
Act (OPMA)? The surprising answer under Washington law is: probably.
All meetings involving a quorum of a governing body at which “action” is taken
must be open to the public unless specifically exempted under the OPMA. The term
“action” includes more than just making final decisions; it is broadly defined to include
deliberations, considerations, reviews, evaluations, receipt of public testimony, and
even discussions relating to your agency’s business such as the hypothetical situation
above. And physical presence in the same room isn’t required to constitute a quorom;
in Wood v. Battle Ground School
District, Division II of the Court of
Appeals held that an exchange of
e-mails like the one outlined above
can constitute a “meeting.”
The OPMA is not your only concern. Your e-mails relating to city
business, whether sent via a city
account or your personal account,
are public records governed by the Public Records Act (PRA). That means the e-mails
are subject to disclosure unless exempt under the PRA or other law. The ease and
informality of e-mail make it easy to forget about the decorum you might otherwise
observe when conducting city business. Remember that there is no exemption for
embarrassing e-mails.
Also, consider the subject matter of your e-mail. If news is
Angela Belbeck is a memimportant enough that you feel compelled to send an e-mail to
ber at Ogden
other members of your governing body, that news is probably of
Murphy Walinterest to the general public. Finding an outlet to hold that dislace, PLLC.
cussion on the record helps keep the public informed of current
Her practice
focuses on muevents relating to your city.
nicipal law with
So before you hit send, take a moment to ask yourself whether
an emphasis on
the content and tone of the message are appropriate. When in
Public Records
doubt, consider whether you would be comfortable with the entire
and Open Public
Meetings.
e-mail being broadcast on local television, radio, or other news
media. If you are unsure whether your e-mail might trigger a violation of the OPMA, be sure to contact your legal counsel.
E-mail makes it
easy to forget
about decorum.
www.omwlaw.com
CITYWISE
JEAN GODDEN, Seattle City Councilmember
AS THE
NOTEBOOK
TURNS
CITY 101
THOUGHTS FROM TWO SIDES OF THE PUBLIC RECORDS DEBATE
WHEN IT COMES TO open government, I’ve worn two hats.
In the days when I was a reporter for the Seattle Times, I kept
a public disclosure request form on my desk, ready to fill in
specifics whenever I needed to find out what was happening
behind the scenes in government.
Fast-forward seven years, and I am now on the other side
of the notebook as an elected Seattle city councilmember,
serving my second term in office. So now I frequently find my
office the subject of public disclosure requests, most of which
are honest attempts to understand government processes. A
few requests might be considered frivolous by some, although
it is important to realize that one person’s nuisance request
might be another’s headline goldmine.
In the past year, my office has received 173 public disclosure
requests—around three a week. Staff time spent responding
to each request has ranged from a half hour to more than 40
hours. The most time-consuming request asked for copies of
my Facebook page—which seems easy enough. Except that it
also encompassed every comment I had ever written on the
Facebook pages of all of my “friends” for the previous year.
The most substantive entry unearthed from that exhaustive
search was: “Have a happy birthday.”
Having viewed disclosure from two perspectives, I find
myself struggling with the intent and the impact of the Public
Include a disclaimer
that “this is not an
agency record.”
Never access your site
from agency-provided
computers.
Do not use your site
to gain or disseminate
information about official
agency business.
www.awcnet.org
Records Act. On one hand, I will always be among the most
passionate advocates of open government you will ever find.
People have a right to know what government is doing on
their behalf.
However, I find myself face-to-face with obvious abuses
of the system. While we do charge 15 cents per page for copies, that does not repay government for the amount of time
required to fill these requests. And in a number of cases, those
who have requested information have failed to pick up or pay
for records produced.
Growing demand for public records—and the fact that technology exponentially increases the number of public records
generated each year—will make it ever more difficult to keep
up with requests. With less staff on hand to manage more
requests and more public information available online, I support AWC’s push to add the Public Records
Act (PRA) to its legislative agenda. Seattle
Jean Godden, a
longtime newspahas joined other cities to ask for modernper columnist, is
izing improvements to the PRA. Now the
chair of the Seatquestion becomes: How do we meet open
tle City Council’s
records intent with realistic staffing at
Finance and Budget Committees.
a time when the amount of information
online is booming?
I’m open to suggestions.
Facebooking
the Facts
Follow these AWC tips to
minimize your risk from a
social media website.
Do not solicit “friends”
or use contacts gained
through your duties at
the agency.
Do not reference your
site at public meetings
or in any official agency
documents.
Always keep your expectations of privacy low!
Do not use your
official title, except
as a candidate.
If the site is a campaign site,
use it to discuss campaign
issues, policy promises, and
past achievements, not to
facilitate implementation
of those issues, policies, or
achievements.
23
CITYWISE
AWARDS
WINNER, AWC Municipal Excellence Awards
BUILDING
FROM THE
GROUND UP
A GRASSROOTS VISIONING PROCESS HELPS CONCRETE MEET THE FUTURE.
Other Notable
Projects
Grandview – Public Outreach
Program
In early 2008, the mayor and city council
committed themselves to a comprehensive public education outreach effort
concerning how city tax dollars are spent
and what city services are funded with tax
dollars. The city aggressively promoted a
series of meetings that asked citizens to
provide input about raising additional tax
revenue or, in the alternative, eliminating
or reducing current services. These discussions were grounded in a history of how
city services supported by tax dollars have
been maintained even with the passage of
state initiatives. All information was available in English and Spanish.
ECONOMIC PLANNING
COMMUNICATIONS
Covington – Facebook Initiative
After other outreach efforts had fallen
short, Covington launched a Facebook
page to engage its largest population
segment—youth and families. This social
media platform gave the city a personality to use in postings that citizens could
identify with, and it gave citizens a chance
to engage the city about their concerns.
Within six months, the page had 14,575
views and an average of 7 interactions
per post. And about 84% of the Facebook
page users fell into the segment of population Covington was trying to reach.
COMMUNITY BUILDING
COMMUNICATIONS
Enter the 2011 Municipal
Excellence Awards!
What great things are happening in
your city? Start thinking about what
projects your city can enter in AWC’s
awards program. Entries will be
accepted in the spring. Watch for more
information coming soon.
24
NOT TO BE CONFUSED with a small building-products company based in Yakima,
“Imagine Concrete” defines a grassroots effort that has established a new community
vision for one Washington town at the gateway to the North Cascades.
The process began in February 2009 with the formation of an “Imagine Concrete”
steering committee, a 10-member team drawn from town government, education,
youth, business, and the general public. The committee held an initial workshop in
April of that year to bring together Concrete citizens and other area residents—the
first community event of its type in 13 years. More than 40 participants discussed
what they viewed as positives and problems in the community, and they identified
core values that would help enhance and sustain the area’s quality of life.
After the input from the first workshop had been analyzed, the committee organized a second community workshop in June 2009 around five key initiative areas:
creation of a sustainable community, cleanup of public and private areas, historic
preservation, promotion and support of local businesses, and zoning and planning.
During the second workshop, members of the community joined newly created task
forces dedicated to specific projects, including:
Community Garden: The town council approved the use of three vacant, townowned lots for the community garden project, and work was funded in part by a
$4,000 grant from School’s Out Washington and donations from local business.
Lone Star Building Preservation: This office building and nearby silos are two
of the most prominent physical testaments left to the town’s once-booming concrete
industry. Discussions continue with various state preservation groups about restoring the building and possibly listing it on the National Register of Historic Places.
Economic Development Plan: Community members envision a variety of
businesses offering high-quality employment opportunities in Concrete, possibly
anchored by revitalization of the historic downtown area.
Perhaps equally important as the initiation of these action projects is the fact
that “Imagine Concrete” engaged a wide cross-section of community stakeholders
to develop a long-term plan for the town. Many participants in
the visioning process have said that they felt transformed, both
Check out videos
and other news
as individual citizens and as a collective community.
on the 2010
The collaborative efforts of “Imagine Concrete” grew out
Municipal
of passion, energy, and shared interests. The process engaged
Excellence
people with varying points of view and convictions to foster soAward winners at AWC’s
cial capital and create free spaces for citizens to come together
website.
with businesses, local government, and other community groups.
Together, they have embarked on the work of creating a healthy,
sustainable community.
www.awcnet.org
CITYWISE
RAMSEY RAMERMAN, President, Washington Association of Public Records Officers
MANAGE
YOUR META
BETTER
LEGAL AFFAIRS
SEVEN FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT O’NEILL V. CITY OF SHORELINE
IN O’NEILL V. CITY OF SHORELINE, the Supreme Court
held that the City of Shoreline had to produce the “metadata”
from an e-mail sent to a city councilmember’s personal e-mail
address and stored on her personal computer. The topics discussed here aim to help encapsulate what this ruling means
for Washington cities.
1. What is metadata?
Metadata is often defined as “data about data,” or more specifically information that describes the content, quality,
condition, origin, or other characteristics of data or other
pieces of electronic information. It is automatically generated, updated, and removed by computers (see “Behind the
Scenes” below). It can be stored on computers or embedded
in electronic records.
2. Does O’Neill mean we have to seize employees’ personal computers to search for records?
Probably not, but this is unanswered. The court clearly recognizes that the city may be liable for records on a councilmember’s personal computer, but in a footnote the court “assumes”
that the councilmember will agree to the search. The opinion
does not address what should happen if the councilmember
refuses to cooperate. As the dissent notes, generally you need
a warrant to search private property.
Behind the
Scenes
Conceptually, metadata is like
the DNA of electronic records.
That is, metadata is the tool
computers and computer
systems use to coordinate
three essential tasks:
However, in a 2008 Florida case (Lorenzo v. City of Venice),
a judge ordered the seizure of several councilmembers’ computers in response to allegations of an illegal meeting through
e-mail exchanges. While O’Neill doesn’t mandate the seizure
of personal computers, it doesn’t shut the door on that possibility either. Public employees should practice good document
management when using their personal computers for official
business so there is no need to search the entire computer.
3. After O’Neill, when do we have to
provide metadata?
You must provide metadata when a
requestor asks for metadata, whether
directly or indirectly. In O’Neill, the court
held that a request to see “that e-mail” did
not require the city to produce metadata; the
duty did not arise until after the requestor
had expressly asked for metadata.
But there will be other times when
you may have to provide metadata. If
a requestor asks for a document in its
“native” format (e.g., a “Word” document
in Microsoft Word), then you should provide it with its metadata. If the record
continued
requires redactions, it will
1 ) To translate zeroes
and ones into something we can see on a
computer screen
Ramsey
Ramerman
served as counsel for Maggie
Fimia, co-defendant with the City
of Shoreline, and
argued O’Neill
for the defendants in the Supreme Court. The
views expressed
in this article,
however, reflect
only his own
views, and are not
legal advice.
3) To record the
history of how both
of those processes
occurred
2) To manage
electronic data
25
CITYWISE
not be reasonable or technologically feasible to redact the
native document, so if the request insists on metadata, you
may need to print out the metadata and redact it along with
the primary document, assuming the requested metadata
can be accessed.
An unaddressed question is whether you must produce
metadata when a requestor asks for the record “in electronic
format.” In response to such a request, most agencies provide records in PDF format, which is the most user-friendly.
But when a record is converted to PDF, much of the metadata will be automatically stripped out or changed.
To be safe, if someone asks for a document in electronic
format, ask whether the requestor would like the record as
a PDF or in the document’s native format. If PDF is specified, then you can assume the requestor doesn’t want the
metadata.
4. Does the copy I produce have to be “identical” to
the original document?
Hopefully not, but Shoreline has moved for clarification
on this issue. In the matter at issue in O’Neill, the city provided several nonidentical copies of an e-mail, which the
court rejected because the city had not searched the rel-
evant hard drive for the original. The court also held that
if the city were to locate the original and it was identical,
then there would be no violation. But if the city were not
to locate the original, the court said the trial court should
If you have deleted
an e-mail after it was
requested, it is in your
interest to find it, at
whatever cost.
enter an order “consistent with this opinion”—it did not
hold that the failure to provide an identical copy was an
automatic violation.
So despite the emphasis on “identical” in the opinion,
producing something less than an identical record may be
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26
www.stayinwashington.com
CITYWISE
sufficient as long as all content related to the conduct of
government is provided.
5. Does O’Neill mean I have to save every copy of every
e-mail because each will have unique metadata?
Yes, if there is a pending request. If there is no pending
request, hopefully not, but the city is seeking clarification on this point as well. As noted in the opinion, the state
archivist mandates that cities retain electronic records in
electronic format. But the court fails to acknowledge that
the archivist authorizes destruction of “secondary copies”
despite differences in metadata.
Instead, the court notes that the Public Records Act (PRA)
controls in instances of conflict with the archivist’s rules.
Under the retention rules, as long as you keep one copy,
then you are in compliance, but if the court’s “identical”
requirement is not clarified, it’s possible that the PRA may
mandate retention of all copies.
Most importantly, if you have deleted an e-mail after it
was requested, it is in your interest to find it, at whatever
cost, because your agency will otherwise be liable for violating RCW 42.56.100.
6. Does O’Neill mean I have to give requestors
multiple copies of the same e-mail just because the
metadata is different?
Yes, but only if the requestor wants multiple copies and
you have retained multiple copies. Most requestors don’t
want multiple copies, so before you provide 10 copies of
one e-mail, ask whether the requestor wants all of those
copies—most will not, especially if they will cost $0.15 per
page. Just make sure this interaction is memorialized, ideally in an e-mail exchange.
7. Does O’Neill require us to do forensic searches of
hard drives for every public records request?
Hopefully not. The court remanded the case with the direction that the city must search the hard drive, but the
court does not say whether this is a forensic search or a
standard search. In O’Neill, the city did not perform a standard search of the hard drive prior to the trial court’s ruling,
so the court’s direction is at best ambiguous. Moreover, it
would be incredibly expensive to mandate forensic searches, which suggests that the court had something more
reasonable in mind.
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Cityscape
A World War II–era
“status update”
Posting in a Post-Post World
The means of communication may change, but public records
are still meant to be shared.
For as long as people have shared information with
each other, public records have taken just three basic forms:
in the beginning, in people’s heads; for thousands of years, on
some sort of surface that you could write on and read from;
and now, in the digital domain. But while technology has
taken the recording, storage, interpretation, and retrieval of
records into a whole different dimension, the intent remains
the same: to keep citizens informed about what their community is doing.
Transparency is about equity, accountability, and fairness. It’s one of the cornerstones of a democratic society. You
28
may not always like the message, but it is there to be read,
discussed, challenged, and sometimes overturned.
Today, amazing amounts of information can be stored and
preserved in city halls. Moving from a paper world to a digital
world—increasingly defined by the “cloud” of instantly accessible information—can be a daunting task. Some citizens
distrust what they can’t readily see. Some will always want
paper. Yet all levels of government have to adapt to technology in order to keep records accessible. They’re essential to
helping us understand the decisions of the past—and inspiring us to move forward together.
January/February 2011
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PaPer Weight - Association of Washington Cities

Transcription

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