Clear and transparent ain't cheap

By PAUL JENKINS

The best part of this job is rooting around for information people are just dying to hide. The trail can lead through land or tax records. E-mails. Letters. Time sheets. Phone records. Computer records. Hotel records. You name it. Anything can leave a trail.

Jenkins

Years ago, somebody decided the public should have open access to government records because it would, for instance, help folks understand why a liquor store opened in their neighborhood despite their howls of protest. As you can imagine, governments generally would rather the records remain closed to protect the brain-dead and to defuse pesky headlines.

Some of the public access laws across the nation are very strict and very protective of the public’s right to know. Florida’s Sunshine Law springs to mind. Some are a joke; some have been defanged.

A few weeks back, just before the Republican convention, people kept telling me that two members of Gov. Sarah Palin’s team were helping the governor in a vain attempt to organize the ouster of her nemesis, Randy Ruedrich, as chief of Alaska’s Republican Party.

These two, I was told, were calling key delegates during normal work hours, urging them to dump Ruedrich. Many thought, correctly, that using state employees, state telephones, state time and state computers for a patently political purpose was a bad thing — if it were true. Faced with that, you almost have to ask for the records because, as it turns out, some in the highest reaches of this administration have not had a problem in the past using . . .

(cont'd from front page) government time and equipment for political purposes, but it was unclear whether these two had played follow the leader.

After a number of reports about the telephone calls, I thought, “Hey, why not just ask for the records and clear up the matter?” So, on May 2, I made a request for the public records of incoming and outgoing calls on state telephones, cell phones and land lines assigned to the two for the period Feb. 15 through April 13. I also asked for their leave records for the same period to see whether they would have been off the state dime when they made the calls, if they made them. Then, I also asked for all e-mails sent and received by the pair at their assigned state computers for the period. Any one of us should be able to see all of that.

But I was not holding my breath because, after all, this is not my first rodeo. A few years back, well prior to this administration, I asked for a document and got back a piece of paper that was entirely redacted, except for one word — “this.” Why that got through remains a mystery. Records requests often go awry for one reason or another, including a determination by government that it will not provide the documents in the hopes that you cannot afford a lawyer for a protracted court battle.

It’s odd, but I figured a close examination of the files I was asking for likely would clear the two, end the rumors and that would be that. Ta-da, another mystery solved and I could get back to surfing the Web.

A very nice lady, Linda Perez, e-mailed me Tuesday to say the state was extending the basic “10-working-day period for responding to your request.” She assured me, “This extension is not invoked for purposes of delay.” Why would I have thought that? It was delayed, she assured me, because of the “voluminous amount of separate and distinct” records and consulting with lawyers. Holy cow! These two staff people, I thought to myself, must be busy as beavers to generate that amount of stuff.

But then came the rest. It turns out that the requests “will generate chargeable fees,” she wrote. Just how much in cash money American are we talking about? $1,250. A G-plus for public information supposedly available to all of us, to pay people already on the state payroll to round up stuff we already paid for. Oh, and that does not include, she said, charges for “determining whether any records are privileged.” Gee, I wondered, what are the odds that any of these records would be considered privileged? What she was saying was that there are a host of ways to deny information.

To heck with it, I said. Given the choice between Harley chrome and $1,250 for public records, it’s not much of a contest. Mind you, I would have gotten off cheap. They were going to hand some scientist a $500,000 tab for state polar bear information the public already paid for. Go figure.

It’s too bad that — because we finally have the government we deserve — we will never be able to prove Palin’s staff members did or did not break the law. It certainly would restore my faith in government to know for certain they did not.

It is sad that Alaska’s public records law, designed to provide public access to the workings of government, is based in large part on a person’s ability to pay. Instead of serving us, it now serves the government. How very disappointing.

If anything, I came away from this experience with this in mind: “Clear and transparent” really does exist with this administration. Honest.

It will only cost you something like $1,250, or maybe a whole lot more.

Paul Jenkins is an editor of The Anchorage Times. His e-mail address is This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it