Bills in Olympia seek to rein in records 'fishing'

Faced with tightening budgets, cities and other public agencies across Washington are begging the state Legislature to grant them relief from a seemingly unlikely culprit: the state Public Records Act.

Government lobbyists are making the rounds in Olympia with horror stories about civic gadflies who repeatedly file massive requests for documents — devouring time and money better spent on police, sidewalks or other services.

The Association of Washington Cities has made changing the records law a top legislative priority this year. The group is pushing bills that would allow governments to charge records requesters for personnel costs and reduce or eliminate penalties in public-records lawsuits.

The effort has alarmed public-records watchdogs, who say the governments are exaggerating a small problem — and proposing solutions that would encourage stonewalling of legitimate inquiries by citizens and the media.

"I expected a full-court press from the agencies and that's what we're seeing," said Toby Nixon, president of the Washington Coalition for Open Government, a nonprofit supported by media organizations including The Seattle Times. "They've come up with every idea they could think of and thrown them all at the Legislature hoping that something will stick."

The Public Records Act, created by a 1972 citizen initiative, says all state and local government documents are presumed public unless they are specifically exempted by the law. Agencies that lose lawsuits alleging they've wrongly withheld public records can be hit with fines of $5 to $100 a day.

Too open-ended

Cities, counties and other agencies complain they've seen an explosion of records requests in recent years. Ramsey Ramerman, an attorney who represents cities in records disputes, said the law as it stands now is too open-ended and invites abuse.

"When there are no limits on what people can do, it's real easy to get out of control real quick," Ramerman said. "I could take 20 people and bankrupt the state of Washington with the Public Records Act."

One proposal before lawmakers would make it more expensive or slower to obtain large batches of records. HB 1300 would allow agencies to begin charging personnel costs for requests that take more than five hours of staff time in a month to process. (If a requester refuses to pay, the bill would allow the agency to limit time spent on the request to five hours a month.)

Under the current law, agencies can charge only 15 cents per page to copy records and are prohibited from charging for the time it takes staff to gather and review them, and redact any portions that are exempt from disclosure.

A pair of other proposals would try to give agencies a chance to resolve records disputes before they become lawsuits.

HB 1139, backed by Attorney General Rob McKenna, would encourage requesters to file formal notices with agencies before filing a records lawsuit. The agency would have 21 days to respond and would not be liable for penalties if it provides the records. If a person sues without the formal notice, agencies would have 30 days to turn over records with no penalty.

Cities favor a similar proposal, HB 1299, that would encourage face-to-face meetings with agencies and records requesters prior to open-records lawsuits. If no meeting is held, courts would have the discretion to reduce or eliminate penalties against the agency.

Exaggerations

Lobbyists for the public agencies and cities said they support the records law but want tools to combat a minority of unreasonable requesters they say are draining the public treasury.

But the stories they've been telling lawmakers are not always what they're cracked up to be.

For example, Ramerman recited supposedly egregious cases at legislative hearings last month, but on further scrutiny the cases were not as dire as he made them sound.

At a Senate committee hearing, Ramerman said the city of Puyallup had a request recently "for all of their records" — a request he said was going to create a "mammoth cost" for the city.

Similarly, King County had a request for all its e-mails from 2008, Ramerman testified. "That was 22 million e-mails that had to be gone through," he said.

But records officials in Puyallup and King County told The Seattle Times those requests were essentially abandoned after officials asked the requesters for clarification about what they wanted. The officials didn't have to go through the massive records searches that Ramerman had suggested.

Still, both governments support changes to the records law, saying they do receive unreasonably broad and expensive records requests from time to time. "We've got our doozies," said Cheryl Carlson, city attorney for Puyallup.

In another case, Ramerman told a House panel that a state prison inmate had received a $4,000 payment from the state because Department of Corrections officials had accidentally left a single page out of some records he'd requested. In fact, the penalty was $360, according to the state Attorney General's Office. The inmate also received $590 to repay legal costs.

Ramerman said he hadn't meant to leave the wrong impression with lawmakers and added there are plenty of other examples of unwieldy records requests.

He pointed to the small Snohomish County town of Gold Bar, which has been inundated with expensive requests from a couple of citizens.

Most came from one woman trying to prove a theory that a former mayor had an improper relationship with a city employee. She filed more than 50 requests in 2009, demanding more than 27,000 e-mails and other documents, according to Gold Bar Mayor Joe Beavers.

The town of about 2,100 has just four full-time employees. But Beavers estimates the town had to spend about $200,000 over the last two years and hire a paralegal just to process the requests — consuming more than 10 percent of the town budget.

"This is a whole lot of money for essentially no good effect for the public and that really irritates me as a taxpayer," Beavers said.

Beavers said the town got some relief when it passed an ordinance saying it would spend only 12 hours of staff time a month responding to records requests — a rarely used solution allowed under the current law.

Legislative deadline

It's not clear how much appetite there is in the Legislature to make sweeping changes to the records law.

With a legislative deadline for bills to move out of committee approaching Monday, most of the records bills were still stalled.

One bill that did pass a Senate committee last week would act as a sort of compromise on the issue of penalties in records lawsuits.

SB 5685 would eliminate the $5 to $100 range for records-law violations, allowing judges discretion to award any amount — or none, depending on the facts of the case.

Jim Brunner: 206-515-5628 or jbrunner@seattletimes.com