Florida Commission on Open Government Reform
Sarasota public hearing
Testimony of Paige St. John
Investigative Reporter, Herald-Tribune, Sarasota, Fla.
February 12, 2008

My name is Paige St. John. I am an investigative reporter for the Herald-Tribune. I have worked with Florida’s public records law while covering the Legislature and state government since 2000, have worked frequently with Pat Gleason in challenging denials to public records and have taken repeated refusals to court, prevailing each time, including in the release of Florida’s voter rolls and felon lists.

The accumulation and assimilation of public information into large and complex data systems creates an immense tool to take government’s measure. However, the failure of Florida public record law to keep current with this rich resource and fully embrace it with the same precept of open public access has opened the door to subjective censorship.

Lapses in present law hold the public hostage to whatever blind spots government agencies have thoughtlessly or intentionally created in their splendid systems. The first is in poorly designed databases that cannot intelligently retrieve the wonders they house – a crime aided and abetted by the statute that says no agency is required to “create a record” where none already exists. Then a financial hurdle is set before any member of the public trying to overcome the deficits of these over-priced electronic lockboxes, a hurdle made insurmountable by public agencies that treat their record warehouses as profit centers or hand them over to private vendors to plunder.

For instance:

Every regulated property insurer in Florida is required by law to submit quarterly reports showing the number of homes they insure in every Florida county, how many policies they have dropped, and to what degree they insure against hurricanes. I can think of nothing more critical to the current public debate than this most basic piece of information.

Yet for years these records were housed by a private contractor and even the Office of Insurance Regulation was limited to retrieving predetermined reports. To obtain the raw and complete information necessary to show how Florida’s property insurance market has changed since 2004, I was required to pay the contractor’s rate – in excess of $100 an hour – to download what turned out to be no more complicated than a simple Excel spreadsheet. I was paying for access that state government should have insisted on from the start.

What’s more, to decipher the codes in the data I had been handed was another charge – for the vendor to provide what turned out be publicly available information posted on a state web site. The fact the Office of Insurance Regulation has since figured out how to generate subsequent reports quickly and at no cost is itself troubling, because it underscores the subjective whimsy at play when governments are left to make up their rules of what records to provide and which ones to help hide.

For instance, the Office of Insurance Regulation requires every Florida property insurer to file detailed financial data in electronic form – but directs that those be filed with a national organization that charges the public $10 to view each of those reports. A financial statement is $10. An auditor’s report is $10. That’s $20 to see State Farm, $20 more for State Farm Florida, $20 to see Allstate, $20 more for Allstate Floridian, $20 for Nationwide, $20 for USAA, $20 for USAA Casualty – $140 and we’re not even through the state’s top five insurers.

A member of the public hoping to see these state-mandated electronic records directly from the state is out of luck. They can be accessed only through a third-party’s pay- per-view system. Other public records where access is measured by your bank account:

Though the Department of Revenue collects and assembles property tax rolls from each of Florida’s 67 counties, ownership is retained by counties, some of which sell the data to vendors who charge exorbitant rates to retrieve this information.

Driver license records – available only on a per record search. Criminal history records through the Department of Law Enforcement – available for $25 each to the public but the entire database is for sale to private vendors.

To draw a bright line of contrast, access to electronic public records can be simple: Florida voter registration rolls, more than 13 million records, available for $10 on a DVD. Quarterly campaign finance records, $10 per CD.

There is little difference between any of these digital records. They are created and maintained as a matter of course by public entities engaged in the public’s business. They were paid for by public dollars.

The public should not have to pay again to see what it has already bought.

Testimony before Commission on Open Government Reform in Sarasota