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June 09, 2010 12:55 AM UTC
24 Comments
say exactly how, where, and why he would “scale back” the request? The quoted material simply notes that he makes a broad assertion without any particulars. Without detailing the specifics of a different plan, it’s easy to say you would do it differently. And not very persuasive.
from every school district that isn’t already party to Lobato.
..it seems like it would be easy for Garnett to explain which items he would delete and he could explain why each deleted request is not relevant to the pending litigation. Or else, Garnett could propose an alternative request entirely, assuming he knows enough about the litigation to say so. And if he doesn’t know enough to say so…well, maybe he shouldn’t say so.
Granted, this is my knee-jerk reaction.
a lot of that would already be on file (or should be) with the Dept of Ed, and Suthers could send someone over to look it up.
But, seriously, all
The CORA smacks of burdening school districts — maybe in hopes they’ll exert some pressure on their fellow districts?
On the other hand, this lawsuit could result in hundreds of millions of dollars being redirected (maybe), so it’s not like both sides aren’t going to treat it like a massive lawsuit with tons of paper.
Of course, I don’t know the allegations made in the lawsuit. Likewise, I don’t understand how pressure from one district to another could affect the claims at issue in the litigation.
Unless Suthers is planning on single-handedly solving the high unemployment in this state by hiring several thousand people there’s no way they can make use of all this info. This is nuts. He needs to reduce it to what he has the bandwidth to make use of.
And why is he asking for such an onerous amount of production when he clearly can’t get through most of it? Is the cost imposed on the districts being done for some reason?
…is beyond digestion? As others have noted, mountains of documents are not unheard of in big litigation. Moreover, many school districts are quite small and would not, I suspect, have nearly as many documents as you imagine.
I’d love to see line-by-line justification for this request. I’d love to see a cost estimate for complying with this request. And I’d like to know if this information is already aggregated somewhere else.
Does Suthers just not give a damn? Or is there some back story here that’s not evident. This seems punitive and I don’t understand why.
But each of these articles is something that every school district should have at its fingertips.
If a school district can’t provide this information with or without a CORA request, then how do we know what’s being done with our money?
is already on file with the Department of Ed. A full record of everything else is likely going to involve long hours at a copy machine as many employment and academic records are still kept on paper. Certainly it will be a monumental task to copy out all the backup documentation, since every canceled check and bill for the past five years will need to be provided.
For things like awards and honors, the ambiguity makes this weird– what’s included in that? Does a secretary wander down the hall with pencil and notepad to jot down the names in the trophy case?
This time of year, teachers and most support staff are gone or focused on more important things. Either things like curriculum development and grant writing get dropped, or some pissed off people are going to be called in for some overtime. This is going to be expensive.
Could the next step be a subpoena for everything else to somehow prove the world is flat and R’s hate communities, education, thought, and science.
Believe the Open Records act provides for payment of reasonable expenses of complying with these sorts of requests, including research, copying, staff time, etc. Doesn’t the AG’s office have a fairly healthy budget?
Hey, I’m not an attorney, but Suthers seems to be awful creative these days…
Hoist with One’s Own Petard Dept.
I can’t help but think that if a private citizen filed such a request, the school districts would gladly meet the request for a dollar or two per page. Charging such outrageous costs for access to public documents is how government entities discourage public access.
A 2008 bill that was developed as a result of reporting by the Coloradoan limits the cost of duplication to 25 cents a page. Prior to that change, Colorado governments were allowed to charge $1.25 per page, which was the highest in the country.
Having said all that, there’s no doubt governments use the threat of high charges to try to dissuade records requests. That was the subject of a Coloradoan editorial Tuesday.
http://www.coloradoan.com/arti…
Thanks for posting the link.
A response must be given within 3 days, and even for voluminous requests you may have less than 2 weeks to gather all the information. They can be a huge headache.
And it’s an insidious way to short-circuit the normal litigation processes. No judge needs to review or approve this request for reasonableness, or to decide whether the information is “likely to lead to the discovery of relevant, admissible information.” In fact, there’s no review at all as to the reasonableness of the request.
The only ammo the school districts have is that they can require advance payment of charges to copy the records, but often people try to get around that by (like Twitty) claiming that they should be entitled to waivers, or requesting PDFs rather than paper copies.
Just reading the request, it seems ridiculously huge. And Suthers could at least have told the school districts, “look, I don’t care if you take a little longer than the statutory 3 to 10 days to respond.”
The Colorado Open Records Act doesn’t make exceptions based on motivation. Public records were generated with money provided by the public and belong to the public. CORA requests may be a headache, but discomfort for a governmental body is not an exception to disclosure.
Also, the AG has granted school districts an extension beyond the 3 days — up to a month in some cases — and has expressed a willingness to work with districts on the scope of the request. That was addressed a bit today in the Coloradoan editorial linked above.
Reading the request list, some of this comes close IMHO to a nuisance request. I think the public should have access to the records its government generates on its behalf, but I think 0.25 per page is perhaps a bit of an undercharge, considering the time it takes to gather and print the info.
The law also allows the government to recoup personnel expenses for larger requests, at a rate of up to $20 an hour. The purpose of the modified law is to make fulfilling CORA requests, especially larger ones, cost-neutral for the government, but not a profit center for government, which was happening before (remember, the public has already paid to generate these records). The 25 cent copying charge is meant to cover the duplication costs. It’s hard to argue that the previous $1.25 charge (which was set in 1968, when I believe most record copying was done by monks with quill pens) was simply recovering copying charges.
I’m not sure what a “nuisance” request is. Almost all records in possession of the government are, by law, open to the public, and it is the government’s legal (and I would argue moral) obligation to provide those documents when requested.
If someone comes along and asks for a huge document dump just to annoy the department, and does this irregularly but taking tens of hours each time, how does that affect staffing? It’s not like the departments have the spare cash to hire a full-time staffer to handle these loads, so when a big request comes along, it disrupts (to a greater or lesser extent) the operations of the department.
In an ideal world, where everything is electronic and neatly arranged, I’d agree with you Bob. But I know enough to know that’s not even remotely true. Suthers’ request is, just looking at it, too broad (WTF does he need lists of honoraria for – if he’s got salary charts, he shouldn’t need them…)
But the requester would have to pay for the request, so unless you’re Bill Gates, there’s a pretty finite limit to what you can do to “annoy” someone.
Not to get too philosophical, but government is there to serve the people. Often times, government workers may feel “disrupted” having to perform their jobs. Open, transparent government lies at the heart of democracy. We can’t say you get to have records but I don’t because I’m somehow annoying.
Finally, the why of the request is irrelevent. The list of honoraria is public record, and any member of the public who wants to ask for it is entitled to review that information and copy it, if they so desire.