I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it’s the West Hawaii Today that is the culprit for today’s headline, “Not-so-free flow of information” and the subheadline, “Want public e-mail records? It’ll cost you.”
News flash: I submitted a Uniform Information Practices Act (UIPA) request, and it’s not going to cost me thousands of dollars as the story suggests. In my UIPA request I asked for and was granted a media exception. Nancy Cook-Lauer, your story about Shawn James Leavey being charged for his UIPA requests over the last several months was misleading and unnecessarily inflammatory.
“Looking at just one month’s worth of e-mails for six County Council members
could cost you $2,300. One month’s worth of e-mails for
four administration officials would cost $1,675.”
In fact, here is the the information Nancy Cook Lauer received from Corporation Counsel Lincoln Ashida via email yesterday, Thursday, July 9, 2009:
“Enclosed is the invoice sent to Mr. Leavey. The second document is a more detailed version of the same invoice. It includes services and fees for not only April 2009 by the May and June 2009 request as well (Bill Takaba).
· Mr. Leavey has made requests for emails for January, February, April, May and June 2009. His requests have expanded to include many department heads. I was under the impression when I spoke with you today he had not divulged that information to you.
· We complied with the earlier requests and waived all search, review and segregation charges. This is something we do for the vast majority of requests that are made to our County by our citizens.
· The most recent requests by Mr. Leavey require significant staff time to review and segregate the material, since he has expanded his request beyond the Mayor’s Office to several department heads. The County collects and maintains very sensitive personal information from our citizens in order to perform our work and serve our community. Our citizens demand and expect that we take great care in ensuring their significant privacy interests are protected by making the necessary redactions to the material and not irresponsibly releasing this information to anyone.
· Under the OIP’s administrative rules, the County may charge for search, review and segregation time. The County may also make incremental disclosures of the material. When making incremental disclosure as in the present case, the County may make a good faith estimate of the search, review and segregation time, and collect 50% of that total ahead of time (before actually doing the work).
· Given the magnitude of this request and in order to be accurate and fair to Mr. Leavey, we had staff perform the work to get an accurate tabulation of review and segregation time. We now have the accurate time spent instead of an ‘estimate.’
· We notified Mr. Leavey on July 1 that he could pay $722.95, and we would provide the records to him. This total represents the grand total of $1,675.90, less the $30 waiver, and $200 he had previously provided to us, divided in half. Had we not done the work, we could have first collected the $722.95, performed the work, release the records to him, then collect the balance. However in this case we were willing to cut the total due the County in half since we used the current invoice as a basis for estimating future charges for review and segregation time.
· Note that we waived all search fees for all months, including the April, May and June requests.
· As with all UIPA requests made to the County, we strive to comply and as in this case limit the expense to our citizens. Mr. Leavey’s case represents an exception to the norm given the nature of his request, the magnitude, and staff time needed to protect personal information concerning our citizens as well as information required to be kept confidential for the protection of the County’s legal interests. Further, staff time devoted to complying with these requests means less available time to tend to the many projects the County is working on for the benefit of all our citizens.”
Shawn James Leavey is a former Big Island Weekly free-lance writer who attends the University of Hawaii-Hilo. Nancy Cook-Lauer reported that his requests for county records are “part of his political science studies at the University of Hawaii-Hilo and Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash.”
In March, Shawn James Leavey emailed me with a “blog advertising inquiry,” saying, “I am in the process of launching an internet-based Hawaii-State Political Action Committee called ‘CAN! The Citizen’s Action Network.’ This PAC will be a fundraising force supportting Hawai`i’s grassroots candidates running against out-of-touch incumbents now backed by corporate, special interest PACs statewide. I am interested in inquiring about advertising on your blog, to solicit donations from your readers. If you’re interested, I would appreciate if you could provide the following information to gauge the ‘new media markets’ CAN! will be advertising in. How many hits does your blog get per day? What are your day by day hit stats for the past month? Average per month for the Past Year? How often do you update your content? What issues do you cover? Who is your target audience? What are your advertising rates? What kind of placement? What sizes? For a week? Per month? 3 months? 6 months? jpg/gif? flash?
Thanks, but I am really not in a position to provide answers to all your questions.
Good luck.”
July 10th, 2009 at 10:42 pm
Don’t be to hard on Nancy. If it’s the Shawn James Leavey That wrote for Kubos’Rag he is a really bad reporter or a lying sack of crap. What he wrote about me years ago was the latter. He apparently isn’t smart enough to check facts or lacks the testicular fortitude to confront the people he lies about.
July 11th, 2009 at 7:01 am
Tiffany: I am very glad to hear the hurdles to obtaining government records now are not the mountains they appeared to be–based on the Nancy Cook-Lauer WHT article.
During the Kim administration, I confronted difficulties obtaining documents from Chris Yuen’s Planning Department.
So big thanks for getting the record straight.
I am appreciating your in-depth reporting. MW
July 11th, 2009 at 7:52 am
Wha?
If Leavey does not pay the fee (or does not win an appeal of the fee), then the County performed all that segregation of records for no reason! i.e. the taxpayer money was wasted. This is clearly a reason why the admin rules say estimate the segregation expenses first, collecgt 50% of the fee, and THEN go to work. Another reason for that rule, of course, is to scare off people requesting records with inflated cost estimates, but we’ll leave that aside for now.
With the actions taken now, we might has well paid the staff to dig holes and then fill them back in.
Of course, to avoid that wasteful outcome, somebody eligible for a waiver of fees (i.e. a member of the media) could simply ask for the records which have been already segregated in response to Leavey’s request… Then, assuming the records led to some sort of story, at least the public might get SOMETHING out of all that work.
July 11th, 2009 at 8:33 am
[...] blogged yesterday about the high costs to do a county UIPA request. It appears once again that WHT’s biased reporting got me hook, line,and sinker once [...]
July 11th, 2009 at 8:35 am
[...] blogged yesterday about the high costs to do a county UIPA request. It appears once again that WHT’s biased reporting got me hook, line,and [...]