Seattle: last to disclose

Seattle officials should embrace the opportunity presented by a state performance audit that shows the city was not as responsive as it could be to requests for public information.

OK, so the city ranked dead last in the state auditor's recent report on how quickly and thoroughly 30 municipal governments — among them Tacoma, Bellevue and Spokane Valley — responded to requests.But the role of performance audits, as authorized by Initiative 900, is to provide feedback on an agency's practices. Ideally, the information helps them improve.

In a response to the draft audit, Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis noted that the city's 53 "public disclosure officers" handling of more than 5,300 disclosure requests attests to the city's responsiveness.

That's commendable, but comparisons matter and Seattle's responsiveness was deemed worse than all other municipal governments.

The city claims that's partly because many of the requests were submitted to the city clerk's office, where requesters were asked to resubmit the requests to another branch of government. The clerk says that has been her practice for 15 years to ensure the request does not get lost. That might make sense within the bureaucracy.

Looking from the outside in, however, the city can seem like a monolith. And regardless of who has the specific records, a public agency ought to be able to take a public records request and get it into the right hands as soon as it's submitted.

The Seattle City Council is required to hold a hearing within 30 days on the audit report's findings. City officials should stop criticizing the audit's findings and embrace the opportunity.

Sounds like the city has 53 public-disclosure officers who could put their heads together and find a way to do better.