Two victories for open records

Monday, January 19, 2009

A district judge in Clark County has provided a significant ruling for open-government advocates in Nevada who worry that cost is the biggest obstacle to obtaining public records.
Judge Susan Johnson’s ruling came in a case brought by activist Karen Gray, who was represented by the ACLU.
The judge said Gray doesn’t have to bear the extraordinary expense of paying government employees to sift through school-board emails to determine if some of the content is private.
Quoted in a column by Review-Journal Editor Tom Mitchell, the judge said it is not Gray’s “burden to bear the expense to determine what public records she seeks may be confidential. Once she makes a request for public records, it is the governmental entity’s burden to produce the record or explain why it is not furnished. In short, if CCSD believes certain e-mails generated by its school trustees contain confidential information, it is the one who should bear the expense of review and redaction, if any, as well as provide Ms. Gray an explanation as to why the public record will not be produced.”
This is exactly the correct reading of the statute — and of the government’s responsibility to provide records.
A similar issue came up in the Reno Gazette-Journal’s lawsuit to obtain access to the governor’s emails. Government attorneys argued, in essence, that they had no responsibility to show content of the emails was confidential.
Speaking of the Gazette-Journal, it also won in December its case to gain access to public employees’ names and salaries.
In that ruling, Judge Patrick Flanagan noted that “all parties agree that the names, salaries and positions … are already public record.”
Sparks, Reno and Washoe were ready to release the information sought by the newspaper when several public-employee groups went to court to block it.
They argued the government workers could be subject to retaliation if their names were public.