Another week, another county government thumbing its nose at the Public Records Act – and paying the consequences.
Earlier this year, the Freedom Foundation submitted a public records request to Island County for government employee emails sent and received during a specific period of time. Under the PRA, public agencies must respond to a request within five days to acknowledge receipt of the request, clarify any ambiguities in the request, and provide an estimated time of fulfillment. See RCW 42.56.520.
These obligations are all triggered long before government officials must actually produce the records requested. These are preliminary duties, duties to communicate with requestors and take requests seriously—and these processes are vital to the Public Records Act.
Notwithstanding this legal duty, we received a different response from Island County – crickets.
Months went by without so much as an acknowledgement the county had even received our request. This non-response was a clear violation of the letter and the spirit of the law. As noted in the PRA:
“The people of this state do not yield their sovereignty to the agencies that serve them. The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know. The people insist on remaining informed so that they may maintain control over the instruments that they have created.”
Washington law demands the government actively communicate with requesters and fulfill their requests. But how can Washingtonians possibly use the PRA for its intended purpose — keeping the government under control — when the government refuses to take the law seriously enough to acknowledge it received a public records request in the first place?
As a reward for its utter indifference to the Freedom Foundation’s information request, Island County agreed to a settlement under which it had to fulfill our records request and pay $15,000.
The Freedom Foundation is committed to advancing self-government and holding high-handed and irresponsive governments accountable, wherever they manifest themselves. When the government ignores its legal duties and waters down one of Washingtonians’ strongest self-governing tools, we declare, “enough is enough.”
Our hope is that government agencies across the state will finally begin taking their PRA duties seriously. With Freedom Foundation on the march, Washingtonians’ rights under the PRA are safer and getting stronger every day.