OLYMPIA — State lawmakers have heard horror stories about how an increasing demand for large volumes of public records is taxing the financial and human resources of cities, counties, school districts and other government agencies.
What lawmakers haven’t known is the cost of complying with the Public Records Act — in dollars and cents, not anecdotes. Only then, lawmakers say, could they consider reforms to help local governments recoup expenses and deal with problems linked to vexatious requests.
Last week, they got an answer, or at least a partial one, from a report issued by the state Auditor’s Office.
State and local governments spent nearly $61 million processing 285,000 requests in a 12-month period, according to the results. The amount is likely higher as less than a quarter of local governments responded to a request for information for the report.
“It shows it truly is a problem and certainly a costly one for local agencies in our state,” said state Rep. Terry Nealey, R-Dayton, who is spearheading a yearlong effort to come up with potential reforms.
Government agencies at all levels are wrestling with the challenges posed by complying with the vaunted Public Records Act, a law created by a 1972 initiative.
Demands for records — traffic accident reports, emails, texts, police videos — are on the rise. Modern technology is making it possible for individuals and corporations to submit hordes of requests automatically through a mode known as a bot request.
In 2015, the Legislature directed the state Auditor’s Office to conduct a study “to establish an accurate cost estimate for providing paper and electronic copies of records in response to requests under the public records act.”
Prior discussions lacked sufficient data and the purpose of this report is to help inform their discussions going forward, said Senior Performance Auditor Sohara Monaghan.
The report’s findings echo what local government leaders have been telling lawmakers.
Locating, reviewing, and in some cases, redacting records can consume large amounts of time for government workers. Those labor costs are borne by the public agency because the law, as now written, does not allow a requestor to be charged for the time and costs incurred in preparing records for release.
The Public Records Act only permits charges for making paper copies of records or these days the price of a CD or thumb drive if that is how the material is transferred. If records are emailed, then there’s no payment.
Agencies recovered only $350,000 of that $61 million in expenses, the report found.
The report contains several suggestions such as allowing recovery of costs for material and personnel time. It also suggests developing an alternative dispute resolution program. It also suggests exploring creation of a statewide service for tracking and producing records for government bodies at all levels, as is done in Utah.
The policies and practices laid out in the study “are potential solutions that the Legislature and (local) governments can consider as they try to come to a compromise,” Monaghan said.
Earlier this year, as the report was under way, lawmakers refused to pass a bill to let local governments limit how much time employees spend processing requests and to prioritize the order in which requests are handled.
But they kept the conversation going through a 42-person work group convened by Nealey and Rep. Joan McBride, D-Kirkland.
“Access to public records is extremely important for open government,” she said. “But it does have a cost to it and the cost is high.”
For the report, the Auditor’s Office sent surveys to 2,363 government entities. A total of 923 responded in some fashion, including 32 counties, 165 cities, 115 school districts and 80 state agencies. Snohomish County took part as did the cities of Everett, Edmonds, Lake Stevens, Monroe and Snohomish to name a few.
Overall, 541 survey respondents reported spending $61 million to deal with 285,180 records requests in the most recent year. For cities and counties, that typically meant the 2014 calendar year while state agencies tended to use a fiscal year starting July 1, 2014.
State agencies, commissions and boards, which received 74,354 requests, accounted for $22 million of the expense total. The state Department of Social and Health Services racked up $6.75 million in costs, the most of any respondent to the survey. It deal with 11,719 record requests.
Snohomish County handled 7,648 requests, ninth highest in the survey, at a cost of $1.22 million. County workers are spending twice as much time processing public records requests compared to five years ago. Last year the County Council created a management-level position to oversee the processing of requests countywide.
Overall, the single largest expense cited by those surveyed was for staff to locate and prepare each public record for release. It accounted for 90 percent of the costs, according to the report.
Most requests are handled pretty swiftly. The survey found 58 percent were dealt with in five days or less and 81 percent within 20 days.
The study cost about $1.1 million to produce. Of the total, about $138,700 went to a private firm, BERK Consulting, Inc. of Seattle to design and administer the statewide survey, and analyze the results, Monaghan said. Auditor’s staff did the majority of the work and the rest of the money reflects the cost of the time they spent on this study, she explained.
A representative of daily newspapers, including The Herald, said the study’s design was flawed, and that makes the results unhelpful for the work group.
Cost information needed to be broken down into greater detail, said Rowland Thompson, executive director of Allied Daily Newspapers. And the data should have been collected by an independent auditor rather than allowing agencies to self-report to ensure consistency, he said.
“The study doesn’t do anything with the information. It just aggregates it. The report is hopeless. It is just a survey and not a very good one. I’m so disappointed,” he said.
Deputy prosecutor Sara Di Vittorio, who advises Snohomish County employees when responding to public records requests, filled out the survey on the county’s behalf. She’s a member of the statewide work group.
She said there’s value in the information but not enough detail to propel the work group toward consensus on any changes.
And, Di Vittorio expressed disappointment at the number of special districts and local governments that didn’t participate.
“This was our chance. We’ve been telling (lawmakers) for years that there’s a financial impact of the public records mandate and now there’s a number,” she said. “Because of the way that the study was done it is easily discredited and dismissed.”
Though consensus may elude the 42-person work group, McBride said she’s intent on incorporating the best and most workable ideas into a bill for consideration in 2017.
“This is not a case of ‘Are you for or against public records?’,” she said. “We are all for public records. It is about the management of them.”
Nealey is convinced changes can be made without damaging anyone’s access to records.
“I am determined to get there this time with a solution,” Nealey said.
Jerry Cornfield: 360-352-8623; jcornfield@heraldnet.com Twitter: @dospueblos.
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