Councilmember Toby Nixon discusses importance of Public Records Act

By on February 7, 2012 in Government

KING5.com has posted an online video interview with Kirkland City Councilmember Toby Nixon titled, In Depth: Open records advocate explains importance of law.

Nixon, who is President of the Washington Coalition for Open Government, discusses the importance of the Public Records Act.

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  • Margaret Wiggins

    But any time you have a law like this with a financial penalty for failure to disclose… you have games. Lawyers who ask for 100 pages and get only 99 but wait the max amount of time before complaining so they get the max penalty charged the government entity… a set amount for “every day” they “withhold the document requested” can add up to thousands. This little part of the law has records clerks across the state totally paranoid that they will “screw up” without even trying.

    • http://www.tobynixon.com/ Toby Nixon

      Margaret, the law was changed last year to reduce the minimum penalty from $5 per day to ZERO. The purpose of that change was specifically to address these inadvertent or technical omissions — like when two pages get stuck together while going through the copier and don’t make it to the requester. The judge is allowed to exercise discretion, and very likely would not award penalties for such an inadvertent omission.

      • Anonymous

        That is good news. Now… what can you do about King County who refuses to forward electronic documents for free? :-)

        • http://www.tobynixon.com/ Toby Nixon

          I’m guessing they aren’t paying attention to Mechling v. Monroe. That case said clearly that agencies must provide electronic records in electronic form (and not by printing them out in hardcopy) if it is reasonable and feasible to do so. It is ALWAYS reasonable and feasible to do so if they don’t need to be redacted (which is the case with most records), and the technology exists to redact electronically, too, especially for an agency with the technological capabilities of King County.

          • Anonymous

            Oh, I was able to convince them I was not going to pay based on that case, and they gave up asking, but they really wanted me to pay them to scan the DOE permit request into electronic format for emailing. I hate to think they killed trees printing the many page permit process forms just so they could scan them, but it sounded like a job security issue.

  • Margaret Wiggins

    Then there is the game that King County plays with the charge for copying… They convert the files to hard copies so any request comes with a 25c a page charge, no free email electronic copies are ever allowed because they have to “scan the hard copy into electronic format for emailing”…. so don’t even think about requesting any county documents without paying for them.

  • Mwiggins37

    Then there is the other game… your request has to be perfectly worded… you could be asking for a 1000 page file and only really want to see maybe a few pages. I tried to get copies of the highway project through Kenmore, and the stack was inches thick… and tried narrowing it down to the state grants for the state highway… still a thick and confusing pile of documents…

    But I agree with Toby that without any law, we are totally at their mercy. Only a lawyer with a case against them could get disclosure cooperation, and that isn’t cheap either.