Earlier this month, Ohio Governor John Kasich, signed into law a bill that will greatly reduce the penalties for unlawful destruction of public records. Sandwiched in the budget amendment bill, and likened to SB 178, the bill sets a $10,000 limit per case in fines that a given agency can pay for destroying public records.

Before the amendment, the state’s Public Records Act prohibited anyone from removing, destroying or mutilating all records because they were the property of the Public Office ( Sec. 149.351.)

The implications of this bill are two fold:

1. Agencies now have leeway to burn or shred public records that they consider either controversial or unfit for the public to see. As long as they can pay the $10,000 fine, then they are good to go.

2. While advocates for this bill believe that it will stop people requesting documents they do not need (especially after they have been destroyed) only to turn around and sue for large amounts of money, opponents feel that the $10,000 cap on lawyers fees will prevent most Ohioans from suing agencies that destroy public records. Several transparency supporters, including newspaper publishers and environmentalists, believe that this is a direct attack on open government.

The Ohio newspaper Association, Ohio Environmental Council, Ohio Association for Justice and the Ohio Employment Lawyers have all signed a joint testimony calling on the Governor to remove the amendment to the Public Records Act from the budget bill. (See joint testimony at the bottom.)

Ohioans are also showing their displeasure in the study: A Quinnipiac University poll released this week shows that 50% of registered voters disapprove of the way the governor is conducting his work.

Ohioans and others dissatisfied with their governor’s commitment to transparency legislation (or, at the very least, their commitment to not signing into law legislation that will directly inhibit transparency) can take action against these kinds of transparency rollbacks. Our campaign to tell our governors not to roll back on transparency now has a tool that makes it easy for you to call your governor’s office and tell them that open government issues -- like public records laws, financial disclosure, and open data -- are important to you. If you don’t tell your elected officials that these issues matter, then anti-transparency measures like Governor Kaisch’s signing of SB 178 will be norm.

Make the call and let us know how it went. By continuing to track our governors’ actions, we ensure that their campaign promises of being transparent are not just promises, but actions they can be accountable for.

P.S. For those of you following our trip to Utah to visit the National Governors Association (NGA), we should note that Governor Kaisch recently opted out of the NGA because he did not feel like it was “worth the amount of money to be [a] member.”

Look for more coverage of our trip this week!

Ohio Public Records HB153 Testimony

In honor of  Tax Day Ohio's Jason Hart took a look at salary information for Franklin County's administrators, specifically looking at raises over the past three years.  He got some interesting results -- most places the highest level people didn't get raises except for one department.

Friday, April 9^th is Tax Freedom Day, when the average American has earned enough to pay Uncle Sam and Uncle Sam’s various relatives what they demand. Ohio is somehow a day ahead of the average, so in honor of the big day tomorrow I thought I’d dig through some salary info for public administrators here in Franklin County. As boring as I am, I ought to make an effort to avoid any talk of numbers or statistics. As stubborn as I am, I won’t!

With employment and the economy in general down for the past year and a half, I wanted to see how the smallest of government big-shots were rewarding themselves relative to 2007 and 2008. Despite widespread populist railing against private industry salaries and bonuses, I expected to see pay increases for the insulated local bureaucrats our tax dollars keep employed. Given some of the things I’ve read recently, I was pleasantly surprised by the data.

A helpful CPA in the Franklin County Auditor’s office responded to my public records request promptly, with salary data on all Franklin County employees from 2007-2010. Download the Excel file if you’d like to check my numbers or do some analysis of your own. I’ll list hourly rates instead of annual salaries, as 2009 contained 27 pay periods instead of the usual 26. Let’s start with the highest branch on the Franklin County tree, shall we?

Read the rest here.

This is a really fascinating use of data and another reason why we can all benefit from continuing to demand that all kinds of information be made available online.  Information than can empower people to find the right questions to ask their government.

Three bloggers have some interesting stories about their Freedom of Information (FOIA) escapades.

In Kentucky, Page One has a post about the State Treasurer withholding public records.

On August 27 I filed an open records request for the following:

• All time sheets, calendars and schedules for State Treasurer Todd Hollenbach from the first date of his official service as Treasurer to present day
• Security camera footage from front entrance that would provide visual confirmation of arrival and departure of Todd Hollenbach from the first date of his service as Treasurer to current

On September 3 I received a letter from Deputy State Treasurer Mary John Celleti:

The Kentucky State Treasury is in receipt of your Open Records Request seeking copies regarding:

1. All time sheets, calendars and schedules for State Treasurer Todd Hollenbach
2. Security camera footage from the front entrance, confirming Treasurer Hollenbach’s arrival and departure.

Please be advised that the Treasury is in the process of filling said request and it may take some time to gather and review all the requested information. Due to the expansive nature of the security camera footage the request may be expected to take more than ten days. Once the documentation has been gathered and reviewed, it will be made available to you. If you have any questions, please feel free to call

It’s now been a month since I filed the request, so I decided to poke around a bit. Low and behold, with the help of great sources, I’ve learned that Todd Hollenbach and his henchman are trying to prevent access to the requested documents. Documents and media which, according to four people in the office of the Treasurer, prove that: Todd Hollenbach barely ever shows up for work, spends most days at a country club and goes out of his way to do absolutely nothing. So you know he’s got something to hide.

This is a pretty harsh claim but the point should be clear.  ANSWER YOUR FOIA REQUESTS!  By deciding to not disclose lawmakers hurt themselves in the public eye.  Then they have to deal with sharp bloggers picking on them.

In Arizona, Expresso Pundit has a post also about withholding public records and how a Councilman helped him get the records he wanted.

Surely you recall the Desert Divas. That's the ultra expensive VIP Prostitution ring that police busted last year.

Back in February, it looked like the case was going to break wide open...Prosecutors were naming names

Today, Phoenix police offered to the media a list of thousands of names in two hefty PDF documents.

Unfortunately, the list was a bust...so to speak. Prosecutors did indeed name names, but they didn't provide addresses. That meant that none of us had any idea if "John Smith" was THE John Smith that you know from the office, or tennis, or church. Without the addresses, the list was essentially meaningless.

So I went to Phoenix Police and said I wanted the whole list....you could hear the laughter from quite a distance. Every media outlet in the state wanted the full list and Phoenix PD wasn't going to provide it.

I pointed out that the clients on the list were neither victims or witnesses and that the record was obviously public.

The Phoenix PIO who called back, said simply, "Good Luck".

After a few months of dead ends, I finally went to my Secret Weapon--Sal DiCiccio. Councilman DiCiccio thinks that if information is public that it should actually be available to...you know...the public. DiCiccio sent his right hand guy, former Tribune writer Hal DeKeyser to take care of it and by golly, they stone walled him too...but persistence pays off.

I got a call last week that the list was available on CD. Well, you are the public too, So here's your copy.

It is great to see an elected official so committed to freedom of information that they will get the information for citizens. Also thanks Expresso Pundit for posting the results online so others can find it.

In Ohio, River Vices submitted a FOIA request and got a unique response.

Under Ohio's Open Public Records Law, I am requesting a copy of the written agreement between the city and the Portsmouth Kiwanis Club for a playground in Tracy Park. A week ago, on Sept. 18th, 2009, at a public meeting in Tracy Park,in response to a question, Rick Morgan of Kiwanis publicly acknowledged that such a written agreement existed, but neither he nor you have yet made that agreement public. Please notify me by email when I can pick up a copy of that agreement.

Thank you.

Robert Forrey

---

Per your public records request;

You are correct in stating that at the meeting in the park the fact was "acknowledged that such a written agreement existed". What I don't understand is why you feel that a confirmation of this fact would necessitate a publication or distribution of the mentioned document.

As you requested, a copy of the document has been prepared for you to pick up at my office. Our regular office hours are from 8:00 AM to 4:30 PM, Monday through Friday.

If there is anything else that I can do for you, which is required by law, don't hesitate to call my office. If it isn't required by law then don't bother asking, because I think that you're a worthless piece of st and I wouldn't ps on you if you were on fire (my opinion). You're a poor, lonely, jealous, old man with aspirations of being a writer. You write your lies and uneducated opinions on people and issues from behind the safety of your slobber stained keyboard with the hope that somebody will read them that doesn't know you and believe that you're more than the pitiful, broke-down, lizard-looking thing that you are, in my opinion. Get a life old man. On second thought, don't bother..............

I do have a question for you. Do you have family and if so do they even like you?

Looking forward to your next Internet issue of "FORREY'S FOLLIES".....NOOOTTTTTT

With little respect for you, Mayor James D. Kalb

Now that's freedom of speech at its best, in my opinion.

The mayor of of Portsmouth does get points for answering the FOIA but it seems that he might want to work on his prose.

Every week I climb into the depths of the local political blogosphere to find the Sunlight. I use this series to highlight local blogs that do a great job of covering local, state, and congressional political news.  This week I have highlights from New York, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Illinois.

Rochester Turning in New York, has a post about former Congressman Tom Reynolds getting hired at a law firm.  Even though Reynolds isn’t a lawyer he was hired for the firms “Government Relations and Public Policy practice.”  Interestingly that sounds like lobbyist.   Good to see the revolving door in full swing.

In Ohio, Thurber's Thoughts has a post  about the mayor of Toledo, Carty Finkbeiner, not respecting open records laws. The post is about how several people have attempted to get information about various issues and their requests not being met.  The author is more outraged at the local paper for not catching on to the lack of openness until they wanted something.

Pennsyvania's Policy Blog talks about the cost of spending databases. The price for an online spending database is apparently not as high a barrier as some public officials thought.

In Illinois, Disarranging Mine about dealing locally with the lobbyists restrictions in the recovery bill. The story of how the lobbyist restrictions are being played out at the local level is pretty interesting.  I think the question is, if there is government money to be spent and there is no lobbyist there to hear about it does it get spent?

Advance Indiana about the new laws of lobbying disclosure just passed by the Indianapolis city council.  Apparently the definition of lobbying does not include entities looking for government contracts or grants.  Interesting.

A group of citizen journalists in the Cleveland metro, so outraged by corruption within their local government, have taken matters into their own hands. Working in conjunction with local investigative journalism efforts, they've launched Map the Mess, a grassroots effort to shed light on the workings of business and government in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. They use social networking maps to reveal connections in government and to illustrations of how public officials conduct business in the county. They hope that the site provides enough transparency to the local government as to change the pattern of "patronage and privilege that frustrates reform and productivity." Here's an example of a map the folks at MtM created showing the various connections of local officials.

The site includes forums that explore such topics as the hidden connections that drive major public projects, rumors spawned by press coverage of local controversies, and isolated facts that might fit into a larger story or pattern.

This is really neat. I imagine we'll see more local transparency groups like MtM across the country.

Every week I climb into the depths of the local political blogosphere to find the Sunlight. I use this series to highlight local blogs that do a great job of covering local, state, and Congressional political news. This week I have highlights from Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Texas.

In Ohio, Writes Like She Talks highlights the House Education and Labor’s Committee’s new blog the EdLabor Journal.

In Pennsylvania, PolicyBlog and Keystone Politics points out Pennsylvania’s new state contracts database. Rhode Island’s Twelfth talks about the Governor’s veto of a bill that would have broadened the open records laws in Rhode Island. She also describes the procedure to get local records in Middletown and Newport, RI. Apparently in Middletown, the "Council has knowledge and access to ANY public records that you requested & would know that you requested it." It seems Rhode Island has a lot of work to do in the open records realm.

South Texas Chisme talks about a Californian man who is filing ethics complaints with Texas ethics commission because he has been going through campaign finance reports.