From the Charlotte Observer (4/5/09): Whenever the question of public records arises, Charlotte city officials bring up Jay Morrison.
They say Morrison’s request for officials’ e-mails in 2007 cost the city tens of thousands of dollars to compile. And, they complain, the transit tax opponent never picked up the documents.
It’s an example meant to suggest that, though citizens have a legal right to ask for certain government documents, all of those requests might not be in the public interest. The city officials, including City Manager Curt Walton and City Attorney Mac McCarley, raise this question: Was it worth so much taxpayer money to put together information that was never used?
The matter resurfaced last month during an Observer interview with Walton about his approach to releasing government records. He said the request by Morrison cost $40,000.
“It was a cost to the public,” Walton said. “And I think the public should be informed of what that cost is.”
Asked for details of the city’s expenses in complying with that request, city officials last week revised the cost estimate to $61,014.91.
That amount included more than 1,300 hours of staff time, including a calculation that 6,100 employees spent five minutes searching their e-mails. (McCarley also estimated that it cost the city $2,000 to put together that estimate for the Observer. “When you folks ask for it, we have to spend time reconstructing it,” McCarley said.)
But some open government advocates say the city is being disingenuous in putting such a high price tag on public information.
“Any access to government benefits the rest of us,” said Mike Tadych, a lawyer for the North Carolina Press Association.
In most circumstances, state law only allows a public body to charge the cost of making copies of a record – not staff time spent finding the information, Tadych said. Making sure public records are public is part of the city’s job, he said.
Had Morrison picked up documents, the city would have charged him $5.80, the cost of the computer disks they were on.
Bob Phillips, of Common Cause North Carolina, a group that advocates for open government, questioned the cost of 6,100 employees checking their e-mail for five minutes.
“I would doubt that many of them were breaking a sweat and saying, ‘Wow, this is really difficult,’” he said. “It’s a little far-fetched.”
Tadych pointed out that the price of open government is often a certain amount of inefficiency. It would be much easier for City Council to hold meetings by e-mail or over conference calls, he said, as opposed to meeting in a room that is open to the public. But the law protects the public’s right to know how its government operates.
“There’s no promise of efficiency in the government elected by the people doing the public’s business,” he said. “The fact that people can abuse it doesn’t mean that the proper reaction would be to close down government.”
Morrison’s request came during a heated debate over a half-cent sales tax that funds public transportation. A school board candidate at the time, Morrison was funding a petition to repeal the tax. He asked for 10 months’ worth of city employee e-mails related to the tax.
McCarley said he tried to negotiate with Morrison to pare down his request and focus on city staff members who would have been decision-makers. That would make made the request faster – and cheaper – for the city to process.
“He wanted to see everything we had done,” McCarley said. “I tried to narrow the scope, and was trying to give him a realistic expectation. He absolutely refused.”
Morrison declined to comment when the Observer contacted him last week.
Ran Coble, executive director for the North Carolina Center for Public Policy Research, pointed out that such extensive requests are rare. While the potential for abuse exists, especially during elections, most people ask for much smaller amounts of information.
“Ninety-nine percent of the time it’s more of a short request – one day, one conversation,” he said.
Tadych said that part of the reason the city spent so much money was because of its own record-keeping system. If the city kept all of its employees’ e-mails in a single database, he said, they might have been easier to search.
“I think it’s misleading to tell somebody it costs $40,000,” he said. “If you’re aggregating all of the public e-mails, you can just search one database.”
McCarley has said the city has been targeted by critics, who he believes make unwieldy public records request to “harass” public officials. He said that he has heard about software that would scan all city e-mails for key words, making certain public records requests easier to handle.
“We are not where I want us to be,” he said. “There are search software packages available, but they are expensive.”
by Steve Harrison, Charlotte Observer Staff Writer