Can you provide more details? What is it about WA sunshine laws that make the government misunderstand a request, overestimate the cost of providing the requested data, and then provide data that was not requested resulting in a breach of disclosure laws?
It's because Washington agencies are required to cover reasonable attorneys fees for their opponents after losing open records lawsuits (one of the factors in our FOIA laws)
So when Author sent the request to Seattle, they have this above cited example (and 100s of others across the the State) where a mistake could create a lawsuit the costs this loads of money.
Did you know that the burden is on the agency to establish that its denial of inspection is proper?
Did you know that the court could award you an amount between $5 and $100 a day for each day that access to the records was denied.
So, if they don't give you everything you ask for you can sue. And it's easy (relatively) to win in WA for that because of our FOIA laws, then the agency has to pay for the lawyers and a penalty for delay of the records. For emails that means $5 * (Days of Delay) * (Number of Records).
In short, if Seattle fucked up this FOIA request, denied or delayed -- that could have cost them millions of dollars.
The author didn't understand that and (like a fool) blames the city and city-workers.
> In short, if Seattle fucked up this FOIA request, denied or delayed -- that could have cost them millions of dollars.
Sorry, but that sounds like bullshit. The Washington law provides for agencies to take reasonable time on a request, especially one a request that is complicated and broad. In fact, unlike the FOI law for federal and other states, the Washington law does not proscribe the number of days that an agency must respond by, only that they be made "promptly":
The city of Shoreline did not have to pay out $500K "because of mistakes they made on a FOIA request", not according to what you posted:
> The City of Shoreline will have to reimburse $438,555 to cover the plaintiffs' costs as Washington agencies are required to cover reasonable attorneys fees for their opponents after losing open records lawsuits. Shoreline also agreed last year to pay a $100,000 statutory penalty after the court found that the city violated the state public records act.
They paid $438K for fighting the request for seven years. They paid an additional $100K penalty because they were have found to violated the law. They did not pay for "mistakes", at least not mistakes in good faith.
SEATTLE – The Washington Supreme Court has upheld a $502,000 penalty for Public Records Act violations by the state Department of Labor and Industries, in a ruling which affirms that judges can calculate such fines based on each page of a withheld record.
Another example in WA, the kind of thing that scares public sector employees.
I have direct personal experience with this, and direct knowledge of others receiving payout from government (in WA) for similar violations (almost had to start another suit this month).
Your narrow interpretation is splitting hairs. The danger is real to the government workers executing these requests
Sorry, I don't understand what your argument is. Both articles you link to refer to large penalties imposed against government agencies for withholding the requested records, over a long period of time.
In your original comment [0], you suggested that employees feared of making innocent mistakes that would lead to open records lawsuits. None of the examples you've provided describe that situation. Instead, they involve agencies (and their lawyers) who have decided to refuse a request and fight it out in the courts. What does that have to do with being a danger to employees who handle these requests?
Well, spend some time with those employees, they know about these cases.
This means that these employees frequently send more, faster to avoid a big public issue.
The point is that individual people feel pressure and make decisions based on these articles (and many not so public cases) that in retrospect are not that great.
And then some blogger makes foolish claims, as if it was incompetence rather than fear.
I've sent quite a few FOI requests myself when I was a reporter, and my experience biases me against thinking there's a significant problem of state employees sending out FOIAs quickly/prematurely out of fear. In fact, I've never dealt with an employee who broke protocol -- for non-routine requests, the vast majority of them consult with their FOI officer/legal counsel. And they have no incentive to rush things because most FOI laws allow for a delay in response time -- Washington's law doesn't even have a set time limit in which the government has to respond.
> The point is that individual people feel pressure and make decisions based on these articles
That is literally the situation of every public servant -- as just about any police officer will tell you. The difference with FOI is that the law provides ample protection for government employees to take their time to get it right, and every investigative journalist I've ever worked with puts up with those delays -- it's only when the delay goes into months/years such that it's tantamount to a rejection that legal action is threatened, because the lawsuit itself takes months to resolve.
The only example lawsuits you've found were ones in which the agencies refused to fulfill the request. Until you can show a single instance in which a state employee, or even an agency, was punished because they were late while trying to respond in good faith, I don't think we should assume you know what you're talking about when you claim the author has "no background/understanding" of WA's public records laws.
It's especially absurd that you're trying to argue that the mistake the city of Seattle made in his case was done out of hurried fear, when the author provides correspondence that shows he and the city emailed back-and-forth from April to August before they sent him the data. A technical screwup (via internal miscommunication) is the most plausible explanation by far, as no one in the IT or FOI office had any reason to rush this request.
