The city of Anchorage wants to charge people who request public records for time the city legal department spends figuring out which part of the request is okay to release and which parts need to be kept confidential. But state law currently doesn’t allow local governments to assess those charges, so city leaders are asking the Alaska Legislature this year to change the law.

“There is a court decision that says attorney time in reviewing docs [sic] is not currently recoverable under public records requests,” City Attorney Dennis Wheeler wrote in an email Tuesday. Most requests aren't burdensome, Wheeler says in the email. “Most requests are easy and don’t involve much time at all—and we don’t bill for it.” But a few requests are so broadly written, Wheeler says, that it takes hours or days to review the requested material for information the city can’t give up, such as confidential employee records, trade secrets of private companies that do business with the government, and attorney-client privileged material. “Often, these requests are politically motivated and are fishing expeditions,” he says in the email.

If the city could warn the person ahead of time that they’re on the hook for legal costs, one result might be “better, more focused records requests,” Wheeler wrote. But Anchorage Assembly Chair Patrick Flynn says if records requests have become burdensome at City Hall, he’s never heard about it. The change to state law is not a priority of his, he says, “but I didn’t make a big fuss about it” when it showed up in the administration's first draft of the city’s legislative requests in October. That’s partly because the request is softened with the words “recoup a portion of the cost of legal review” and so Flynn figures it’s not as bad as it could be.

“If it had said any person filling a request shall pay any and all costs associated with the request, I would have gotten fussy about it,” Flynn says. “I think some of the state’s behavior in recent years has been over the top.”

In December 2007 the State of Alaska Department of Fish and Game told a University of Alaska biologist he needed to pay $470,000 to the department to process a records request. Things got worse eight months later after John McCain named then-Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate in the presidential race and the state was flooded with requests for public documents and the Palin administration, some of which got hefty bills in response.

The city’s request comes in a year when two state lawmakers—Representative Mike Doogan and Senator Johnny Ellis, both Anchorage Democrats—have bills that would reform public records law. Neither bill allows the city to begin charging for attorney vetting of requests, but both require state business done via email to use email servers under state control.

But don’t count on the legislature passing anything.

“Frankly it’s not going anywhere. Don’t kid yourself,” Doogan says of his bill. He says legislators are interested in ethics and public records reforms, but he gets a sense they’re also fatigued by ethics issues. “It’s like everybody is kind of worn out, so even simple little fixes might be tough to get through,” Doogan says.

Doogan says his top priority is to keep public records open, but his bill also addresses costs by capping public records search fees at $100. It’s not clear how that might affect a legal-review fee at the local level.

“The most important thing to me is that there is public access to public records,” Doogan says. “The next most important thing is that people shouldn’t be bankrupted to get that.”

Other ethics and open-government issues might be addressed this year, too. (Or maybe not, if Doogan’s correct about the atmosphere in Juneau.) The state’s legislature-tracking website retrieves 19 bills when the subject heading “ethics” is clicked. They range from a bill to exempt community boards—road or fire service areas boards—from parts of Alaska’s Open Meetings Act to one that would allow the state to reimburse a governor (and other state executives) who spends money on legal defense in the event of an ethics complaint. The state would only pay if the executive were exonerated.

scott@anchoragepress.com