Florida Commission on Open Government
Diane McFarlin, Publisher, Herald-Tribune Media Group
February 12, 2008 – Sudakoff Center
Hello, and thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today.
My name is Diane McFarlin and I am publisher of the Herald-Tribune Media Group in Sarasota. Our organization includes a daily newspaper with six editions in Sarasota, Manatee and Charlotte counties; several web sites; a 24-hour cable news channel, and various weeklies and magazines.
Our mission is to be the most trusted and valued source of news and information in this three-county region. As such, we are avid users of First Amendment rights.
I also have been a champion of Freedom of Information as a past officer of the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors and the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
Today am I speaking primarily in my role as publisher, someone whose job it is to make certain that editors and reporters have the resources they need to keep the citizens of this community informed.
Sometimes state and local governments make that responsibility difficult to fulfill. I’d like to share three examples:
In February 2005, the Herald-Tribune began investigating how education officials regulate teachers who violate ethical standards. It was then that reporters first asked the Department of Education for a copy of the database they maintain on each teacher misconduct case.
Over the next year and a half, the Herald-Tribune dedicated an enormous amount of time and resources to gaining access to this public record. Negotiations involved dozens of letters and phone calls made by multiple reporters.
At first, the education department claimed the database could not be made public. Then, it asserted that the newspaper would have to pay to remove protected information from the database because DOE officials had not made sure the information was input correctly.
DOE attorneys sent the newspaper an invoice for nearly $20,000. $20,000!
Through months of negotiations over price and access, state education officials repeatedly said they were days or weeks away from providing the database, only to renege on that promise.
At one point the delays got so bad, we sent a reporter to Tallahassee, hoping a face-to-face appeal would pry the database loose. The newspaper also enlisted help from its attorneys, who spent hours in discussions and drafting responses to state denials.
After nearly a year, our newsroom felt it had exhausted all reasonable means of getting the record. So it found an alternative – using paper records to build its own database. The paper spent several thousand dollars for copies of the records, then devoted three reporters full-time for more than three month to build the database. The newspaper also spent hundreds more dollars hiring outside help for data entry.
The database was not the only public records that required extraordinary resources to obtain. For the same project, the Herald-Tribune requested budget documents from the Department of Education’s Office of Professional Practices. It took months for the state to provide basic budget information. The state sent an invoice for more than $400. Compiling three years of budget documents apparently took three different DOE employees nearly 20 hours. The state charged the newspaper nearly $45 an hour for one of those employees.
The second example concerns the Manatee County School District.
After our reporters learned that a district administrator who retired while facing rape allegations had a long history of questionable behavior with students, they requested personnel records for every teacher who had been fired or resigned for inappropriate conduct.
Manatee school officials took months to fill the request, and sent the newspaper a $3,000 bill.
That number was inflated by the fact that the district tried to charge the newspaper for the time it took THREE different employees, including two attorneys, to review and redact the investigative files.
The district went a step further. It tried to charge the newspaper for mailing out notification letters to every employee or former employee mentioned in each investigation. This included people called as witnesses.
While state law does require school districts to give employees a chance to respond to potentially negative personnel records, this is supposed to happen before the information ever goes in the file. Not after someone asks to see it.
The notification and arguments over cost delayed the public records request for months. The dispute between the district and the newspaper was only settled when a new attorney was hired for Manatee County schools.
Third: This summer, there was a heated battle brewing between our local sheriff and the county commission. Commissioners wanted the sheriff to cut his budget, while the sheriff said it was already cut to the bone. Our sheriff even threatened to take his case straight to the governor.
The dispute gave us the idea to find out whether all three sheriffs in our coverage area had been good stewards of the taxpayers’ money. It is a classic watchdog story that has probably been done hundreds of times.
For that project, time was one of the most critical factors. We felt it was our responsibility to get the information to the readers before budget hearings began in the fall. If we’d found examples of waste, but didn’t publish until after commissioners yielded to the sheriff -- or vice versa -- our story would have been little use to readers.
We managed to get our stories in the paper the weekend before the budget hearing began, but it was close. Unfortunately, our reporters had to spend more time -- literally weeks -- fighting to get the public records than they did conducting interviews.
And the most frustrating part was how differently the agencies treated the requests. One county gave us everything we needed quickly and for free, while another argued for weeks and charged us nearly $1,000 -- despite the fact that we had asked for the same information, and each agency kept it in an almost identical format.
If you tally up the costs of just these three examples – and, believe me, there are more – you have paid the salary of another reporter who could be out there uncovering information that would help our readers be more informed and productive citizens. Instead, we wasted precious time and money on disputes that are specious and disruptive.
Of course, we are an organization that makes money for the purpose of doing this sort of work… but what about the average citizen or small agency? Certainly, for them, these steps toward access would have been cost-prohibitive.
On behalf of the citizens we serve, I encourage you to take whatever steps possible to a) better clarify charges that agencies and local governments can impose on requestors, especially those ambiguous fees relating to clerical and supervisory labor costs, informational technology resource costs and other special “search” charges; b) recommend specific time limits for compliance with public records requests; and c) recommend elimination of special exemptions and unclear language that enable agencies to interpret exemptions that don’t exist.
It is costly enough to inform the public without having to pay exorbitant fees for information that belongs to the public.
Thank you.
Testimony before Commission on Open Government Reform in Sarasota