Access Awards and Black Hole Award nominations

By Joel Campbell
FOI Committee Chairman

            For many years, The Utah Headliners Chapter of SPJ has been awarding access recognition and Black Hole awards to open government champions and sunshine lawbreakers. I’d like to borrow the theme and nominate a few awards on behalf of the FOI committee to recent FOI newsmakers.

ACCESS AWARDS  NOMINATIONS

1. Maryland judges who ruled quasi-government group should be in the sunshine

            Maryland’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, needs a really big sunshine award after it decided to that a non-profit corporation that handles development in Baltimore has to make its papers and meetings public. The case came after the public became concerned over the activities, including condemning land, of the Baltimore Development Corp.

Read more and more

2. A federal judge who says disaster relief records are open

A federal judge in Mobile, Ala., has denied a local company's request to block the Federal Emergency Management Agency from making public the disaster services contracts it awarded the firm after Hurricane Katrina. Read more .

Let’s hope judges deciding a case involving newspapers seeking access to hurricane relief records in Florida are as open-minded. Three Gannett Inc. newspapers and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel want the government to disclose who got federal aid and how much after four hurricanes battered Florida in 2004. A federal judge denied the request in November. The case now will be heard in the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta.

 "This is a real test of whether everything in government is a privacy issue," said Charles Davis, executive director of the Freedom of Information Center at the University of Missouri School of Journalism and former SPJ FOI Committee chairman told the (Fort Meyers) News-Press. Read more.

3. A federal judge who waived FOIA fees for a non-profit group

A federal judge has ruled that federal Freedom of Information Act requesters do not have to pay fees if they give detailed information about how they distribute information to the public and serve the public interest. The Edmonds Institute, a nonprofit environmental group based in Washington state, had requested information on monetary agreements between the National Park Service and biotechnology firms.The National Park Service turned over more than 300 documents on its bioprospecting policies, detailing benefits-sharing agreements between the agency and private entities over research derived from specimens collected in national parks. Read more at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
 

4. The Florida Bar recommending more open court records

          The Florida Bar has submitted a recommendation to the Florida Supreme Court that, if approved, would establish a system that would minimize the number of court cases and documents not available for public inspection. That's good news for those who believe justice is endangered when it cannot be observed by the public.
          The subject came up when The Miami Herald revealed several months ago that many court-case files in South Florida counties had been sealed from public inspection and that some court cases weren't even to be found in the public records. All this secrecy was ordered by the judges hearing the various cases, even though Florida has a strong Public Records Law, backed up by a constitutional amendment and court precedents.  See a recent story in the Miami Herald.

One of those precedents, from the 1970s, involved a divorce case that a powerful state senator wanted sealed from public view. On appeal, he lost and the court file was opened. Read more at the The (Lakeland, Fla.) Ledger
 

5. Chicago-area journalists who uncovered crime at libraries

            Reporters for CBS2 and the Beacon News found a lot of crime and inappropriate behavior at public libraries throughout the Chicago metro area.

Thousands of internal library incident reports and police records were obtained through the Illinois Freedom of Information Act.

Aurora's three library branches have been the site of 1,118 police service calls since 2000. Aurora police records reveal 108 assault, battery or disorderly conduct calls; 83 theft calls; 44 drunkenness or public intoxication calls; and two bomb threats.

"When you put it all together in one lump sum, it is like wow!" said Eva Luckinbill, executive director of the Aurora Public Library. "But when you deal with one or two (incidents) a week it doesn't hit you the same."

Read the Beacon News report.

           

With so much good, news there is certainly plenty of FOI bad news.

BLACK HOLE AWARD  NOMINATIONS

 

1. Connecticut Properties Review Board stays 30 years in the dark

            It’s really hard to believe this one. A Black Hole Award to the Connecticut Properties Review Board is certainly overdue.

For nearly 30 years, the Properties Review Board, based in Hartford and charged with providing oversight of state properties, had been illegally conducting its business behind closed doors, a state Freedom of Information Commission hearing officer has concluded. The scope and length of the longstanding FOI violation appears unprecedented in state history.

Since being confronted with the alleged violation in a complaint filed by two environmental activists, the board has reviewed and amended its public notice and meeting practices with the Office of the Attorney General to conform with the Freedom of Information Act.  Read more at The (New London, Conn.) Day

 

2.  Southern Illinois U. Carbondale withholds university employment contracts

 Southern Illinois University Carbondale recently won round one of the battle against two Southern Illinois newspapers for disclosure of university employment contracts. Judge Leo Zappa in the circuit court for the Seventh Judicial Circuit in Sangamon County  granted the university’s motion for summary judgment in Count II of the lawsuit brought by The Southern Illinoisan and by Jerry Reppert, publisher of the Anna Gazette Democrat.

 The judge’s order refers to Copley Press, Inc. v. Board of Education for Peoria School District 150, a prior case ruled by the Illinois Appellate Court that personnel files are exempt from records that must be made public under the Freedom of Information Act. Zappa’s order states that “a document cannot be made part of a personnel file simply by placing it there… (but) the requested records in the case at bar are the type one would expect to find in a personnel file, and thus are per se exempt from disclosure.”

In most places, college employee contracts, including the really lucrative ones given to football and basketball coaches and college presidents, are public record.

Read more at The Southern,

 

3. Cooper City, Fla., Council chats in secret on taxpayer’s tab

            This one instills a lot of confidence in the residents of Cooper City. It’s been a tradition for years for the city’s elected officials and city manager to get together for drinks and dinner before city meetings. Of course, they say they didn’t talk shop at these gatherings and thus didn’t violate the state’s open meetings laws. But it in an investigation exposed by WFOR-CBS4, something certainly smells fishy when city officials eat and drink together and then return to city hall to vote on budgets and policy. Since most states open meetings law say that a meeting occurs where a quorum of officials is gathered, one has to wonder if these people really understand both the letter and spirit of Sunshine laws. And the kicker is all of the drinks and food bills have been footed by taxpayers. Read the editorial in the Miami Herald.

4. Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich  keeps  files closed

According to a Bloomington Pantagraph editorial, Blagojevich is demonstrating his arrogance and his lack of commitment to the free flow of information by refusing to release information on unsuccessful job applicants and subpoenas his administration has received in a federal investigation of corruption.
     These refusals have persisted despite opinions from the Illinois Attorney General's Office that the public is entitled to see this material under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act.

 5. Honolulu Board of Education holds a secret vote

The Board of Education is resisting an opinion that instructs the board to "immediately" disclose how its members voted when James Shon was fired as executive director of the Charter School Administrative Office.

Board Chairman Randall Yee said that members will meet in executive session Nov. 14 to make a "collective decision" on whether to reveal the information. "From our perspective as a board, we do have the ability to not do it," Yee said, but he stressed that no decision has been made.

In an opinion, the state Office of Information Practices said public records laws require the board to disclose "the motions made and the votes cast by individual members" in its Sept. 7 executive meeting. Read more at the Star-Bulletin.

6. Washington County, Tenn., Commissioners  meet in secret

JOHNSON CITY, Tenn. - Seven of Washington County's commissioners met unannounced with architects to discuss plans for a $109 million school construction project in a move that some uninvited commissioners called a possible violation of the state's open meetings law. The commissioners described the Friday meeting as a "question-and-answer session" and information-gathering effort and said no county business was discussed or decided. Read the Knoxville News Sentinel
 

7. Utah’s Davis School District closes boundary advisory discussions

The Davis School District, based in Farmington, Utah, has violated the Utah Open Meetings Act by closing an advisory committee meeting to the public and news media, a Salt Lake City attorney said. Meetings of the Boundary Advisory Committee has met behind closed doors on six occasions and the practice is expected to continue, according to the district. The policy of closed meetings has been in place since 1999 and was revised in 2002, district spokesman Chris Williams said. "Their policy does not trump state policy," said Jeff Hunt, an attorney who works with Utah's chapter of the Society for Professional Journalists. Read the AP story at KSL-TV
 

8. Pennsylvania judge seals autopsy report
   ALLENTOWN, Pa. — The autopsy report on an Easton police officer fatally shot last year at police headquarters by another officer will remain sealed, a judge has ruled.
The decision was praised Saturday by Lehigh County Coroner Scott Grim, who said the ruling “recognized the importance of the confidentiality of an autopsy report.”
    Commonwealth Court Judge Mary Hannah Leavitt on Friday overturned a lower court ruling that had ordered Grim to make public the autopsy report on Officer Jesse Sollman, 36.
   Two newspapers, the Morning Call of Allentown and the Express-Times in Easton, had asked for the report and sued when Grim refused to disclose it. Read Deleware Online

 

9. Bureau of Land Management fails to release oil shale public comment

Nearly 750 public comments about Piceance Basin oil shale projects are being held from public scrutiny because sifting through their details is taking the federal government longer than expected.

The Bureau of Land Management will not make available the public comments the agency received concerning five oil shale research projects west of Meeker until its analysis of the comments is complete, BLM spokesman David Boyd said. See Grand Junction Sentinel

 

10. Fore Pierce, Fla. City Commission wants public comment off TV broadcast

     They have a right to be heard, but not necessarily to be seen.
    That's the thinking of at least one city commissioner who wants to eliminate the public and commission comment portion of City Commission meetings from being televised.
    Commissioner Eddie Becht said declining to televise comments from the public and his fellow commissioners — the last two items to be heard on meeting agendas — is necessary to reduce potential grandstanding.
    Becht said he will push the idea during a City Commission meeting.
    "I don't view it as censorship at all," Becht said. "There's not a right in the Constitution to appear on television in front of the commission."
    Taxpayers might have a different view, considering they shelled out about $300,000 to cover the cost of televising meetings and upgrading commission chambers. Televised meetings started in July. Read more in the Vero Beach Press-Journal