…the Open Government Ombudsman in the state Attorney General’s office.
Here’s one government office that does what it claims to do. Attorney General Rob McKenna has made open government a priority and it shows.
Tim Ford, the current ombudsman, promptly sent me his legal analysis when I asked for help recently, after the Bainbridge Police Department told me I had to fill out a specific form in order to make a public records request from them. According to Ford, agencies can’t require record requests to be made on a particular form. They’re valid whether they’re made by email, fax, mail or verbally. You can read his email here: public-records-requests-2.txt
I submitted many requests to government agencies under the state Public Disclosure Act (PDA) when I was publishing the Bainbridge Buzz, starting with a request for employee disciplinary records after former City code enforcement officer Will Peddy was fired for falsifying his resume.
Ordinarily, I’m not a stickler about details of the statute, because I sympathize with local agencies and their bare-bones staffing. I know that as the public has begun to appreciate the PDA as a tool for prying information from bureaucracies, agencies have been overwhelmed with requests.
But my request, which was for records about a new officer position submitted in the 2008 draft budget now being considered by the City Council, was time sensitive. I wasn’t able to get to Winslow in the near future to pick up the form, and if I waited for the mail, who knows when it would turn up. Plus, an agency has five business days to respond to a request, more if the agency says it needs more time. These things do have a way of dragging on.
So I called the AG’s office. Within a few hours, Ford sent me his analysis, which I forwarded to police chief, Matt Haney. Haney then acknowledged my emailed records request (more about what I found in a future post).
The BIPD as well as the Bainbridge Parks Department have instituted forms requirements for records request. Under Ford’s analysis, that’s a violation of the PDA.
Ford and his equally helpful predecessor, Greg Overstreet, have shown by their attitudes and actions that the AG’s office is serious about implementing the ideals of open government, as set out in the PDA:
“The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know. The people insist on remaining informed so that they may maintain control over the instruments that they have created.”
Interestingly, both Ford and Overstreet previously worked for the Building Industry Association of Washington, a powerful lobby for the development industries, which bills itself as dedicated to fighting against government regulation. The PDA and its related rules are, of course, government regulations.
It just goes to show that transparency in government is not a partisan issue.
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