Daytona Beach News-Journal

Open Government Mediation

JAMES MILLER

DAYTONA BEACH NEWS-JOURNAL

TALLAHASSEE—A program set up to help citizens, media and government resolve public-records disputes without costly lawsuits is set to get a helping hand.

Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum announced plans last week to appoint from within his office or hire an attorney to referee public-records between media outlets and local governments that seek help.

This will be in addition to a voluntary open-government mediation program required in the attorney general’s office by state law.

“We hope we can help avoid the mediation,” McCollum said last week. He said he was responding to some media concerns about getting help from his office early in the process.

The start date for the new appointment had not been announced Friday afternoon.

McCollum’s press secretary, Sandi Copes, said citizens who encounter problems getting public records would continue to use the open-government mediation program handled by attorney general’s five-person Opinions Division.

Those requests make up the majority of requests, she and McCollum said.

Open-government advocates laud the mediation program, but a prominent watchdog group says it’s been subject to some complaints since losing its key staff member almost a year and a half ago.

Former Attorney General Bob Butterworth created it voluntarily in the 1990s. Then the Legislature passed a law requiring it.

The program flourished under Butterworth and the next attorney general, Gov. Charlie Crist, said Barbara Petersen, president of the First Amendment Foundation, a Tallahassee-based open-government group.

McCollum won the attorney general’s post in 2006—the same year Crist was elected governor.

Crist immediately created an Office of Open Government in the governor’s office and took with him Pat Gleason, an open-government expert who had handled the mediation program under him and Butterworth.

The open-government office isn’t specifically set up to handle mediations or local-government issues. It’s primarily responsible for facilitating openness of state agencies.

Petersen said the First Amendment Foundation had more recently received some complaints from callers it referred to the mediation program.

‘The complaints I get are not that specific, just that it’s not working,‘ she said. ‘(Complaints like,) ‘I called the number you gave me and nobody knew who I should talk to.’

’”It’s the citizens who really need someone to represent their interests. They don’t have the resources of a newspaper or TV station,” she said.

McCollum said he thought it was successful—if anything, more outreach might help.

“I think it’s a matter of perception more than anything else,” McCollum said.

Out of 82 cases the program handled in 2007, 76 percent were resolved through mediation, according to McCollum’s office.

Open-government mediation takes different forms, said Pat Gleason, director of cabinet affairs and special counsel for open government in Crist’s office.

She estimated a third of her cases originated with ordinary people— “people who were concerned about a power plant that could be sited in their neighborhood, people who were having difficulty getting records they needed for a legal proceeding, small businesses.

“Sometimes if you’re an ordinary citizen it can be hard to make the process work,” she said. “It really was such a wonderful job.”

James Miller is a staff writer for the News-Journal.

Reproduced courtesy of the Daytona Beach News-Journal.
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