The AP is reporting that a county government in Seattle, Washington has been ordered to pay a blogger $225,000 for failing to turn over records. Another court has thrown an unrelated $124,000 penalty because it was too low.
King County has agreed to pay conservative blogger Stefan Sharkansky $225,000 to settle a public-records lawsuit he brought over the county’s delay in releasing documents about the 2004 governor’s election…In January, the state Supreme Court struck down a $124,000 penalty assessed to King County in another case. The justices said the amount was not nearly enough to punish the county for refusing to give businessman Armen Yousoufian records involving economic studies of Qwest Field.
All of this is great news for Talk of the Sound. As regular readers will recall we have been filing Freedom of Information Requests with the City School District since last fall. The District routinely ignores FOIL requests, makes false statements about the availability of documents which they have, deny the existence of documents in their possession and otherwise seeks to delay, obfuscate and otherwise make obtaining public records as difficult as possible. Most recently, the District responded to an appeal I filed in March to obtain records I have been seeking as far back as December. Even after the District agreed on April 1, 2009 to turn over records they have yet to be provided.
For those who do not know, New York State requires the District to acknowledge receipt of a FOIL request in 5 business days. The agency (in this case the school district) has 22 business days to fulfill a FOIL request unless they request an extension which required they justify the extension request with a detailed explanation. In the event of a denial the District has 10 days to respond to an appeal of a denial. In my case, the District has had requests going back 5 months, failed to respond to many of them, did not provide documents in the vast majority of cases, failed to respond to my appeal within 10 days, improperly denied many of my requests, agreed to provide some documents then came back three weeks later with an invoice for about $275.00 to obtain records which ought to cost less than twenty bucks by conflating all of my requests into one request so they could artificially inflate the amount of hours it took to comply with my request (state law allows the agency to charge for work required to compile records if it takes more than 2 hours).
Given the district’s repeated failure to comply with the NYS FOIL law, we have brought in an attorney. The good news is that under NYS law, our attorney gets her fees paid by the District if she wins which, in this case, is a slam dunk. The bad news is that it’s not THEIR money so they do not really care what it costs. More tax dollars at work to shield the school district from residents knowing how their money is being spent.