Another Washington State county is paying big bucks for a public records screwup.
In 1972, Washington voters enacted Initiative 276, the forerunner of today’s Public Records Act (PRA), the state-level version of the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). This law requires public agencies to provide citizens with access to their official records on request (with certain exemptions), and imposes significant penalties for noncompliance. These penalties can run into hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars.
My favorite PRA case involves the Blaine school district, which suspended several students for a protest walk-out. The ACLU then requested copies of the district’s disciplinary and the individual suspension notices. These records weren’t exempt from disclosure, and the school district offered to provide them, but only if the ACLU came to their office in normal business hours. The school district refused to honor ACLU’s request to copy and mail the records, which amounted to only 13 pages. This ended up costing the school district over $50,000 in penalties. (You can read one of the court decisions in this case here.) The lesson is, in Washington, public records requests aren’t to be trifled with. (Also, telling ACLU attorneys to go stick it is usually a bad idea.)
Today’s case involves Clallam County, which lost records pertaining to a land use dispute between a property owner and their neighbor. The records have now turned up in a locked storeroom in the courthouse basement, and because the couple who requested the records years ago were already suing the county over its failure to provide the records, the county is now in the position of having to settle the case in order to avoid huge penalties. Their proposed resolution is to buy both properties at a cost of over $500,000. At least the county will get a park in return for the taxpayers’ money. Read this story here.
Yes, Washington has a potent public records law, and public agencies who ignore it or mishandle their records are likely to find that to be very costly.