May 27, 2008

Government Agencies With Nothing to Hide Don't Act Like This.

The Bredesen administration is - once again - trying to prevent a member of the public from accessing public records by making it unnecessarily expensive and difficult for them to do so. The Chattanooga Times-Free Press tells the story of how the Department of Revenue is demanding the Tennessee Center for Policy Research pay more than $384,120 for copies of certain emails sent in the first four months of the year by the Revenue commissioner and six other department officials.

TCPR president Drew Johnson asked the state's Office for Information Resources to provide the emails, as the normal route of asking the Department to turn over the emails means the employees themselves would be tasked with going through their own emails to comply with the request - giving them the opportunity to delete embarrassing emails. Here's a piece from the newspaper story:

"Opryland." "Party." "Prizes." "Training." "Teamweek." And an eight-letter expletive for orgy.

Those are the words that Drew Johnson, executive director of the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, focused on when asking for e-mails regarding "Team Week," an August training session for Tennessee Department of Revenue employees. The training week for 380 employees costs about $140,700, according to the department's full funding request.

Mr. Johnson was curious to find out just what goes on during that week. The expletive has been mentioned as a nickname employees have used to describe the week. He asked to look at messages sent between Jan. 1 and April 30 from the department's commissioner and six others.

Revenue officials gave Mr. Johnson a choice. Department employees could go through the e-mails themselves for free, or the state's Office for Information Resources could do it at a cost of $3,201 for each day of correspondence, they said.

"The issue here, of course is that if someone has an embarrassing term ... on their computer, they're not going to just turn it over. They would delete the e-mail," said Mr. Johnson, who heads up the Nashville-based anti-tax group. "The only way to have an external person check e-mails to ensure that every e-mail is actually turned over is through an electronic master tape."

Sophie Moery, a spokeswoman for the Revenue Department, said the Office for Information Resources sets the price. She said officials made sure to offer Mr. Johnson the option of getting information for free.

"We certainly would not want to leave him with the only option of an expensive search," she said.

Lola Potter, spokeswoman for the state Department of Finance and Administration, which includes the Office of Information Resources, said obtaining the e-mails involves more than just pulling them off tapes.

"What they essentially have to do is build a new server," she said. "It just takes a lot of time, a lot of people."

Restoring an e-mail "post office" from backup tapes takes about six and a half hours and costs about $1,005 for employee time and hardware, according to the office's price structure. There's also a $62 fee for each additional user.

Let's recap Potter's recent history: She refused to turn over documents requested by the TCPR for nine months until she was sued. More recently, she has refused to give another Tennessean - me, actually - access to a single public record, defying state law.

Now, she's asserting that it will take a major information-technology project to recover emails from seven people.

Excuse me, but , bull crap.

And her alternative is to offer a second option that is really just a way for Revenue department officials to cover their tracks.

More bull crap.

Recovering the requested emails from the database is a simple matter of doing some keyword searches and hitting the "save" button to copy the files to a portable hard drive.

It doesn't cost $384,120 and it wouldn't take hours and hours of an employee's time.

A few years ago, Maine blogger Lance Dutson filed an open records request in his state for emails in connection with a story he was digging into involving corruption at the state's Department of Tourism.

After the state turned over a few hundred emails, Dutson began to realize as he read them that he had emails which read like responses to other emails - other emails that the state had not turned over. So he filed an open records request with the agency which manages the state's email system. The result: He was provided with about 1,000 additional emails that the administration had tried to conceal from him - emails that proved to be the smoking gun in his investigation.

Dutson didn't have to pay thousands of dollars to get the emails.

Unless Lola Potter, the Bredesen administration and the Office for Information Resources drop their price to a few hundred dollars - or give the TCPR a third option of having its own people run the searches and download the files - you can bet money the administration is trying to cover something up.

Government agencies with nothing to hide don't act like this.