Records won’t go online, Terrebonne president says

Plans to compile government records for public viewing in a computer system rather than paper files won’t include putting those documents on the Internet, at least for now, Terrebonne Parish officials said.

But a statewide good-government group says making records available on the parish Web site, www.tpcg.org, should be a priority.

The reality is that citizens still have to drive or walk to the government’s headquarters to view the documents, said Ann Heath, staff attorney and research analyst at the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana, or PAR.

Read more here.

Bill to Limit Inmates' Access to Records Passes House

The state's more than 18,000 prison inmates may soon be limited in the types of records they can obtain under the Public Records Act.

This morning, the House passed a Senate Bill 5130 with a vote of 94-2. Supporters say the bill will save corrections officers from inmates obtaining personal information about them.

The bill will go back to the Senate for approval of amendments that one Department of Corrections employee characterized as minor.

"This bill is about justice for our correctional officers," said Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson, D-Seattle.

Under the bill, a court could block an inmate from requesting certain records if a judge finds that the request is intended to harass an agency or its employees, or that fulfilling the request would threaten security or assist in criminal activity.

Read more here.

Where The Sun Doesn't Shine

“Frank, This not the Governor’s personal account,” reads a February 7 email from Governor Palin’s official government email account, written by an aide named Donna to Frank Bailey, the Director of Boards and Commissions for the governor’s office. (Bailey was recently suspended, for his role in the Wootengate affair, but ultimately reinstated.)

“Whoops~!” Bailey wrote back.

The email Bailey was trying to send to Palin, revealed after self-described ethics watchdog and registered Republican Andrée McLeod filed a records request this summer, was a tally of the ethnic backgrounds of Palin’s appointees, noting that of those who had declared an ethnic background, some 10 percent were Alaska Native.

At the time, the governor was under fire because when she had the opportunity to nominate three appointees to the seven-member Board of Game, there were no Alaska Natives amongs her choices. This would have meant that, for the first time since its inception in 1976, the Game Board wouldn’t have had any Native members.

One of the three appointees, Teresa Sager-Albaugh, withdrew her name after lawmakers expressed outrage, and the day after Bailey’s email, Palin appointed Craig Fleener, an Athabascan, to the board.

When new stories revealed that the governor used at least two Yahoo accounts—gov.sarah@yahoo.com and gov.palin@yahoo.com—for state business, McLeod, a former ally of Palin’s, wondered what other state business had been conducted on the private email accounts.

“It appears from at least a couple of these emails that Andrée got in response to her first request that they were doing it purposefully, in order to keep this email traffic out of the state system, to keep it away from members of the public, and that’s really very disturbing,” says Donald Craig Mitchell, an Anchorage attorney representing McLeod in a recently filed lawsuit attempting to preserve any emails on private accounts pertaining to state business.

The state of Alaska requires public records of all public agencies to be open to inspection by the public, with few exceptions—this and laws like it in other states are known as Sunshine Laws.

Ohio Supreme Court to Hear Digital Public Records Case

The Ohio Supreme Court on Tuesday grappled with the realities of the computer age as it weighed the question of when a “deleted” public record becomes a “destroyed” public record.

At issue is a lawsuit by The Blade seeking to force the Seneca County commissioners to hire a forensic computer expert at county expense to recover deleted e-mails from an 18-month period, some of which the newspaper contends may contain illegal private communications related to the proposed razing of the county’s historic courthouse.

“We’re talking about a very finite amount of time here, and we’re talking about e-mails from two or three people to one another,” said Justice Maureen O’Connor. “It just doesn’t seem to me to be that overwhelmingly burdensome or such a huge task here for the county to not even attempt to comply.”

Fritz Byers, The Blade’s attorney, told the court that the newspaper made a request under the Ohio Public Records Law seeking all e-mails sent, received, or deleted for an 18-month period beginning Jan. 1, 2006. The county provided a “smattering” of e-mails initially, he said, but then, after the paper sued, the county produced 700-plus pages of additional e-mails.

He noted that the commissioners have admitted that some records were deleted.

“If the court doesn’t rule fully in our favor, then it will mean that any official will be able to legally cover his tracks and misdeeds by a simple click on the computer's delete button,” said John Robinson Block, The Blade’s co-publisher and editor-in-chief.