FSNE - Sunshine Sunday

That’s how a clerk at the Daytona Beach Police Department repeatedly responded to a request to see reports of all thefts in the city during the previous week.

And with that response, the department — for the second straight year — failed The Daytona Beach News-Journal’s test of compliance with the state’s Open Records Law.

The department wasn’t alone.

Fourteen local police and government agencies failed simple tests, which followed protocols based on state law, of their willingness and ability to provide public records without imposing unnecessary burdens on requesters.

Not all agencies that failed last year failed again this year. And some agencies that passed last year failed the latest test.

The Daytona Beach News-Journal sent volunteer employees to police departments, city halls, publicly funded hospitals and education centers recently to test compliance with state laws requiring public access to records.

The newspaper, working with the nonprofit First Amendment Foundation, conducted a similar test about a year ago in conjunction with newspapers throughout the state. News-Journal editors decided to repeat the test locally this year is observance of Sunshine Sunday.

Volunteers participating in this year’s test reported, as in previous similar tests, that stewards of public information demonstrated a lack of knowledge of their responsibilities under state public records law.

Some demanded requesters’ names, or required them to submit written requests.

Some sent requesters to multiple offices, where officials said they didn’t know of the records’ existence.

Some demanded to know why requesters wanted the information, then acted annoyed or indifferent when requesters refused to respond.

Barbara Petersen, president of the First Amendment Foundation, says most violations don’t result from efforts to conceal information.

“I think it’s a lack of education more than anything else,” she said. “People who are getting these requests don’t know what he law says.”

In the test, employees of most agencies given failing grades at least expressed a willingness to help provide information, requesters reported.

That wasn’t true of the Daytona Beach police clerk, said Pam Costello, an editorial assistant at the newspaper.

The woman who handled Costello’s request was “very impersonal,” she said. “She didn’t care, that was my impression. She was programmed like a machine.”

Al Tolley, public information officer for the Daytona Beach Police Department, said he had no idea why the records clerk made no effort to help the requester see a weeks’ worth of theft reports.

The records clerk should have offered a clipboard full of reports left at the front desk for public review, he said. If that information wasn’t sufficient, police staff could have searched for all theft-related incident reports. The clerk needed only to phone a supervisor, Tolley said.

“It would have taken a couple hours. We could have done it. The bottom line is, the request could have been met within the parameters of the Sunshine Law in a reasonable amount of time.”

Tolley said the department would address the failure with additional staff training.

Eight agencies failed the test because they asked requesters’ names or required them to write their names on forms as a condition of processing the request.

At Halifax Medical Center, a staff member asked a requester’s name and another required him to submit a faxed request before seeing the publicly funded hospital’s latest audit report.

“She said we like to keep track of requests for that information,” said the requester, editorial assistant Greg Lienesch.

The state’s open records law does not require requesters to give their names except in a few narrowly defined situations, according to Petersen of the First Amendment Foundation.

That’s because authors of the state’s records laws recognized that requiring identification could have a chilling effect on a citizen’s willingness to request sensitive information, Petersen said.

Two cities received passing grades despite handing blank forms to requesters. At Deltona City Hall, a requester was given a form with spaces to describe requested records, with the words, Optional Information above a line where the requester could write a name. In Ormond Beach, a request form included no line or request for a name.

The city clerk developed the form to help the city better track requests, and to ensure receptionists can easily locate requested information when a requester returns, Ormond Beach spokesman Ronnie Patterson said.

“We got tired of putting Post-it notes on things and leaving them out at the information desk, and then the note would fall off and no one would know whose it was,” she said.

She said that in the future, city workers would tell requesters that filling out the form is optional.

Oak Hill’s police department failed the test on several fronts - a clerk said a written request was required, said the city’s police chief must approve all requests, and said reports would cost a minimum of $5 each.

State law gives public employees no authority to reject release of public records. And agencies may charge only 15 cents a page for standard- or legal-sized copies, or 20 cents for double-sided copies.

Employees of agencies that passed the test were often friendly, helpful and knowledgeable of their obligation to provide records without asking personal or intrusive questions, requesters said.

“Of course, they are public records,” said a “very cooperative” staff member at the Edgewater Police Department.

In South Daytona, City Manager Joe Yarbrough offered a cup of coffee as a requester waited for copies of e-mail and other correspondence between Yarbrough and the city’s elected officials.

A few of the grades were judgment calls by editors who conceived the test.

The Daytona Beach Shores Police Department failed despite complying quickly with a request for copies of any theft reports in the city over the previous week.

But the department’s records clerk blacked out birth dates of people who reported thefts. That’s not allowed under state law.

In response to a request for comment about the policy, Shores Police Chief Stephan Dembinsky checked with the city’s attorney and confirmed he had misinterpreted a law requiring redaction of birth dates from state driver history records. Dembinsky said he was trying to protect residents from identity theft.

“We were doing it with good intentions, but we had no right,” he said.

Officials at New Smyrna Beach City Hall passed despite charging a requester $60 for 15 pages of e-mails. They charged $2.25 for the 15 pages and $57.75 for three hours that administrative assistant Frankie Robert said she spent searching through the city manager’s computer files. That seemed like a long time to editors, but Robert said the city manager transfers his e-mails to more than 200 computer files, grouped by subject, and she had to look through each of them.

Agencies failed if requesters were sent on complicated searches for information, or turned away and given vague direction on when they might return.

Employees at the DeLand Police Department told a requester to return the next day because not enough staff members were present to handle the request. When the requester called the next morning, an employee said it was also not a good day and said it would be Monday — six days after the request — before she could be helped.

At the Volusia County Sheriff’s Administration Center in DeLand, a requester was sent across the street to the sheriff’s records center - where, sheriff’s spokesman Gary Davidson said, most residents seeking crime reports are sent.

But a temporary worker at the records center apparently misunderstood the request and sent the requester to the sheriff’s operations center on Indian Lake Road, west of Daytona Beach.

At the operations center, the requester noted he was asked his name and the reason for his request and told he would not be helped unless he answered.

After speaking with the employee involved, Davidson said no one pressed the requester on why he wanted the information.

Davidson said Sheriff Ben Johnson has improved procedures for responding to public records requests since becoming sheriff in 2000. Residents frequently request records of property crimes in neighborhoods where they live or are considering moving to, and complaints about responses to those requests are rare, he said.

Davidson cited a key difference between The News-Journal’s test and ways most residents request information.

Often, residents who ask for records aren’t familiar with how those records are kept, he said, and staff members ask questions to more precisely define the request and better understand what a resident seeks.

But in The News-Journal’s test, requesters don’t have a reason for asking for information — other than to test the compliance. Often they’re not coached on how to respond if told that the agency does not keep information as requested, and too quick to interpret as overly intrusive a staff member’s request to provide more details about the information being sought, Davidson said.

Denise O’Toole, The News-Journal’s Sunday editor, said the newspaper’s test is intended to simulate what would happen when a citizen seeks information without necessarily knowing exactly what to look for — or why.

“The state’s law was designed to protect citizens who go on fishing expeditions - without being intimidated by being pressed for their names or reasons for wanting the information,” she said. “Some requests are motivated by only a vague notion of what might be found — if anything. Requests to clarify what someone might suspect will turn up could dissuade the person from asking in the first place.”

Reproduced courtesy of the Daytona Beach News-Journal.