No Bargain for Public Records in Alaska

Alaska is flush with cash, but there are no bargains for reporters and citizens asking for records of the taxpayers' money at work.

On the contrary, the state is setting prices for copies of government documents that could bring Gov. Sarah Palin's administration millions of dollars if anyone agrees to pay them.

Alaska officials said they have been swamped with requests for copies of state records ever since Palin was selected to be Republican John McCain's running mate. For requests of less than 200 pages, the state sometimes waives fees. Agencies also offer news organizations the opportunity to fine-tune their requests to avoid high fees.

The state is charging $960.31 per account to search through e-mails of state employees, which the state said would take 13 hours per e-mail account. Officials say the charges reflect their actual costs of paying state technology workers $74 per hour, not any profit.

In an e-mail to The Associated Press this week, Alaska's senior assistant attorney general said the state will not waive its high fees because of the current budget climate and the public's interest in spending taxpayer money wisely. AP requested that Alaska waive the fees because the information to be disclosed was in the public interest, and Alaska rejected the request.

"State agencies cannot foresee every exceptional circumstance that might make a waiver in the public interest," Ruth Hamilton Heese wrote. "In the current budget climate, however, cost is a very important element of the decision."

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.

'TROOPERGATE' DOCUMENTS SHOW PALIN'S ROLE IN EX-RELATIVE'S WORKERS COMP CLAIMS

On July 11, 2008, Palin abruptly fired public safety commissioner Monegan, saying only that she wanted to take the public safety department in a different direction.
Monegan then went public with his account of the mounting campaign against Wooten from the governor’s family and staff. Monegan told the Anchorage Daily News that Todd Palin showed him the work of a private investigator, who had been hired by the family to dig into Wooten’s life and who was accusing the trooper of various misdeeds, such as drunk driving and child abuse.
Though Palin vehemently denied that she was involved in the pressure campaign, a review by the Attorney General’s office found that half a dozen state officials had made about two dozen phone calls regarding Wooten.
That was when the Bailey-Dial transcript was released, causing Palin to backtrack somewhat while still insisting that she did not know that Bailey had made phone calls about her ex-brother-in-law. Bailey was put on paid leave.
The state legislature decided to investigate Palin’s possible abuse of power and appointed an independent counsel.
Initially, Palin said she would be “happy to comply, to cooperate” with the investigation, but now – after becoming the Republican vice presidential nominee – she, her husband and several of her top aides are resisting requests for depositions.

SARAH PALIN'S 'TROOPERGATE' PROBLEM: THE BACKSTORY

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has denied claims that she and several of her senior staffers illegally accessed the personnel file of her ex-brother-in-law, Trooper Mike Wooten, and disseminated confidential information about the law enforcement official to his superiors.Palin, Sen. John McCain’s running mate, her private attorney Thomas Van Flein, and McCain campaign officials, said the confidential medical and employment records became part of the public record during divorce proceedings between Wooten and Palin’s sister, Molly McCann. Palin is under investigation by an independent counsel appointed by Alaska’s Legislative Council. The probe centers on whether Palin abused her power when she fired Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan in July because he allegedly refused to fire Wooten. The investigation also centers on claims that the governor’s office peeked at Wooten’s personnel records illegally. The McCain campaign said Monday Palin is "unlikely" to cooperate with the investigation.Palin's husband, Todd Palin, and 12 other people were subpoenaed Friday by a committee made up of three Republicans and two Democrats.
The court clerk at the Alaska courthouse in Anchorage explained that the contents of Wooten and McCann’s divorce records do not contain any of Wooten’s personnel, medical, or financial records, other than statements made by witnesses during the trial.
“Under Alaska state law when you reopen a custody and divorce case you have to do initial disclosure,” Erwin said. “That means we are entitled to three different releases: his employment, medical, and financial documents. [Wooten] signed the releases in open court and the releases were exercised.”