Audit faults Seattle's response to requests

A state audit found 30 public agencies, from King County to the city of Yakima, were mostly cooperative and timely in responding to requests for records they must disclose by law — with one notable exception.

The city of Seattle scored worse than any other government agency and was "nonresponsive" to 80 percent of the public-records requests received under the audit, released Monday.

City officials dispute the findings, saying the methods used by State Auditor Brian Sonntag were flawed. A spokeswoman for Sonntag defended the audit as a valid "snapshot in time" but said it would be unfair to make too much of the city's low score.

"Overall, we found the folks are doing a pretty good job. To say the city of Seattle is just terrible is probably not fair," said Mindy Chambers.

Sonntag said he decided to do this performance audit because Washington state residents say they want government to provide more information. The way a public agency responds to a records request can inspire confidence or provoke frustrations and cynicism.

The audit worked like this: Without identifying their purpose, or revealing their ties to the Auditor's Office, Sonntag's staff submitted the same 10 records requests to 10 counties, 10 cities and 10 state agencies between November 2006 and February 2007.

They asked for records that seemed easy to retrieve, including agencies' sexual-harassment policy, names and compensation for their five highest-paid employees, and one month's cellphone records for their top nonelected official.

Agencies were then scored on whether they provided the requested records and how long it took to do so. Lowest scoring were the city of Seattle, 4 points; Yakima County, 7 points; and the state Department of Corrections, 9 points.

Seattle did so poorly for one main reason. The audit's requests were sent to the City Clerk's office. In seven of 10 instances, the clerk's office responded by saying the request should be re-sent to another department. The report deemed that reply both nonresponsive and untimely. In another case, the city said it never received an e-mail request for records, which the audit considered a poor response.

Chambers said Seattle's score probably owed more to its "decentralized" system than to a deliberate dodge. Still, she said, "if you're a citizen and you ask for a record and you're told to redirect your request, it can be frustrating."

In two sharply worded letters, city officials disagreed with the audit's conclusions.

Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis argued in one that Seattle, which employs 53 "public disclosure officers" and fielded more than 5,000 records requests last year, actually performed well in the audit. Ceis wrote that "once the appropriate agency received the request, many of the city's responses were actually quicker than other, much smaller cities."

Why weren't the requests just forwarded to the appropriate department in the first place as routine procedure?

City Clerk Judith Pippin said the risk is higher that a request could get lost or misdirected if her staff "is sending things around in interoffice mail and not sure where it's supposed to go." Instead, Pippin said it's been her practice for 15 years to ask people to resubmit their request to the department that probably holds the records in question. And no one has ever complained, she said.

The state's Department of General Administration scored the only perfect 10s on both tests; the city of Spokane Valley was just one point behind. Standouts in the Puget Sound region include the cities of Bellevue and Tacoma, with 17 and 16 points respectively.

"This wasn't a 'gotcha' or sting operation or anything like that," Chambers said. "We wanted to go out and act like citizens and see at a particular point in time how the governments responded. On different days, the results could've been different."

The performance audit was authorized by Initiative 900, the Tim Eyman-sponsored measure approved by voters in 2005.

Bob Young: 206-464-2174 or byoung@seattletimes.com