Once a Public Record, Always a Public Record... Or Not

State legislators have a longtime practice of going back and expunging controversial votes.

If state legislators hope one day to rebuild the public's shaken confidence in their institution, they could start by ending their practice of erasing controversial votes from the public record.

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.

FOIL-ed RECORDS COME AT A COST

New Yorkers might get an unpleasant surprise when they ask their government for databases and other types of electronic public records.
Besides an e-mail or a disk, they might also receive a bill.

Last month, New York quietly changed its Freedom of Information Law to allow government agencies to charge for an employee's time when they fill citizens' requests for electronic records, provided they need to spend more than two hours filling the request.

The agency must supply an estimate of the cost beforehand in order to be able to collect, said Robert J. Freeman, executive director of the state's Committee on Open Government.

The change, which Gov. David A. Paterson signed into law in August, benefits governments but could discourage citizens from asking for government records, Freeman said.

Previously, governments were allowed to charge only for the actual cost of materials used when the request was filled. For example, someone who requested a CD containing every Boome County labor contract would have been charged $2.

Recently, however, a file of Vestal town payroll records came accompanied by a bill for $127.40 -- five hours' salary for Deputy Comptroller Pam Fitzgerald.

Permitting members of the public to ask for documents in a form other than paper would prohibit an agency from saying no on the grounds the records were too "voluminous and burdensome" to copy, or it lacked sufficient staff -- excuses used in the past, said Assembly-woman RoAnn Destito, D-Rome. Agencies could require people seeking names and addresses certify they would not use them for solicitation.

State records need protection / Reform, awareness essential in handling public documents

When it comes to public records, it seems there are too many cooks in the kitchen and none of them are using the same recipe.
To deal with the continuing problem of hidden or missing records--many of which may be of historical significance--the government has set up a panel of experts and plans to allocate funds in next fiscal year's budget to bolster research into and administration of official documents and important records.
But even with extra funds, any move to protect these records will not be successful if the bureaucrats in charge of handling them are not better educated about their importance and the fact that they are public property.
Every year, close to 1.13 million files are compiled by the central government. The relevant bodies keep the files for a period stipulated by the Freedom of Information Law, and then classify them into one of three categories: those to be stored at the National Archives of Japan, those to be stored at the relevant ministry or agency office and those to be destroyed.
Documents deemed to have historical value are transferred to the National Archives. Yet few files make it that far, as each transfer requires an agreement between the office concerned and the archives.
The National Archives, however, does a poor job when compared to its foreign counterparts. To begin with, there are a mere 42 employees managing the National Archives, as compared to the 300 employed by South Korea's archives administration and the enormous staff of 2,500 at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. The National Archives of Japan building in Chiyoda Ward, Tokyo--the administration's main facility--claims a floor space of just 11,550 square meters, one-tenth the size of the National Archives Building in Washington, the main facility for a network that comprises 22 regional locations and a new 167,200-square-meter building.
In February, the government set up the panel of experts to come up with proposals for a sweeping overhaul of the system to manage important documents.
An interim report released in July by the panel calls for the integration of administrative functions--currently shared by government bodies such as the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry and the Cabinet Office--through the creation of a new agency in charge of public documents. The report also calls for a staff that would number in the triple digits. The new agency would have the final say on whether official documents should be stored in the National Archives or be discarded.
"The loss of important public documents is a loss for the state. So, in terms of national strategy, it's important for us to improve the administration of these documents. Politicians need to promote reform of the system and better awareness among bureaucrats."