Florida carries a reputation for having some of the most broad and open public records laws in the country. These laws are designed to protect your right to inspect government information at a reasonable price. But what happens when knowing about your new babysitter’s criminal past is unaffordable, or a request about inspections at your daughter’s school take weeks or months to complete? It turns out not much at all. Buddy Holland knows the system is flawed. The Duval County property appraiser has worked in local government for 18 years, and he said colleagues have told him they won’t look at requests until the third time they’re made. The reason is simple: no one is watching them. The state lacks an enforcement mechanism for its well-intentioned law, which WUFT News explored last year in “Sunshine Lost.” This year WUFT News spent six months investigating whether Holland is right and county agencies are abusing this lack of oversight.
WUFT
When a public agency ignores, breaks or twists the open records law, your recourse varies by jurisdiction. In some states, when an official improperly responds to your public records request, you can appeal to a higher bureaucratic authority or seek help from an ombudsperson. In most states, you can take the dispute to court. Public shaming and sarcasm, however, are tactics that can be applied anywhere. The California-based news organization Reveal tweets photos of chickpeas or coffee beans to represent each day a FOIA response is overdue, and asks followers to guess how many there are. The alt weekly DigBoston has sent multiple birthday cakes and edible arrangements to local agencies on the 1-year anniversary of delayed public records requests. And here, at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we give out The Foilies during Sunshine Week, an annual celebration of open-government advocacy. In its fourth year, The Foilies recognizes the worst responses to records requests, outrageous efforts to stymie transparency and the most absurd redactions.
East Bay Express
It opens with a warning: This video contains footage from real police body cameras. Viewer discretion is advised. Then, an introduction: “I would like you to hear from me, what happened,” Douglas County (Colorado) Sheriff Tony Spurlock says, facing the camera. The next eight minutes provide a carefully edited glimpse of the events that led to a 29-year-old deputy’s Dec. 31 death inside an apartment complex south of Denver. The video posted Jan. 8 on the department’s social media accounts is punctuated by gunshots and shouts of panic and pain, and undoubtedly illustrates the danger Deputy Zack Parrish and other officers met during that call. Open government advocates also consider it a dramatic example of law enforcement agencies’ expanding efforts to release their own accounts of events to the public and media. There’s nothing wrong with police communicating through social media, open government advocates said. But they worry it allows law enforcement to bypass questions from traditional media and warn that taking advantage of the tools requires agencies to be completely transparent, whatever the situation.
ABC News
Security video shows a Florida sheriff’s deputy going toward the high school building while a gunman massacred 17 students and staff members, but he then backed away and stayed outside with his handgun drawn. The Broward County Sheriff’s Office released the video Thursday showing Deputy Scot Peterson’s actions during the Feb. 14 shooting.
Tampa Bay Times
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s use of military aircraft has cost taxpayers nearly $1 million for eight trips, newly released documents show. That includes a one-week trip to the Middle East in late October, which cost $183,646 for flights on military aircraft. That trip came on top of $811,797.81 in previously reported expenditures for government-funded military aircraft. Emails and other documents were obtained by watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington through a Freedom of Information Act request. They corroborate information released in October by the Treasury Department’s inspector general about Mnuchin’s plane use.
Politico
A handful of Cuyahoga County (Ohio) governments were among 267 cited last year by Auditor Dave Yost’s office for not following various laws pertaining to Ohio’s public records policies. Yost’s office issued 321 citations in 2017 to cities, villages, libraries and school districts for failing to attend public records law training, to have proper records retention policies on the books and to follow other requirements, according to a tally of audits released last year. That’s down from 414 public records-related citations issued to 357 public entities in 2016. The citations were issued mostly for officials lacking public records law training or a complete public records policy. In some cases, the public office couldn’t provide records requested by auditors or failed to do so in a reasonable amount of time. Yost released a report highlighting the citations today to coincide with Sunshine Week, a national initiative to highlight access to public information.
Cleveland Plain Dealer
March 16, 2018
“Intentionally or not, Fairfax officials make it difficult for its property owners to know the full extent of their tax burden.”