THE BIG STORY

More county legal follies

BY RICK BOETTGER

The Monroe County School District’s legal team is making an unprovoked attack on the rights of us citizens, perhaps inspired by the County Attorney’s ruthless, mad attack on SUFA nonprofits, as detailed here regularly.

     Fortunately, the District’s case does a lot less direct harm than the SUFA case’s quarter-million-dollar-and-ruined-lives vendetta. But the District is making a frontal attack on our revered Sunshine Law, which affects us all. Here’s what’s going down.

     Last year, Larry Murray, district watchdog (of the pit bull breed), was getting regularly blown off in his entirely legal and very appropriate Public Records Requests. He finally sued the district to see some salary and contract files. It cost him $500 to do so, ($420 filing and $80 service fees, paying no lawyer  since he argued, as I do, pro se (meaning, representing yourself).

     Knowing they would lose this obvious case, the district turned over the records just before their court date. They then said Larry’s case was “moot,” since he got what he wanted. And the judge agreed. Murray essentially paid $500 for what under the Sunshine laws should be free, or minimal copying costs.

     Murray laboriously researched past court rulings and found very specific guidance: Way back in 1996, and never over-ruled, “Production of the records after the [public records] lawsuit was filed did not moot the issues raised in the complaint.”

     The point is, We The People shouldn’t have to file a $500 lawsuit every time we want to view our documents, and the law clearly upholds this. The law is also specific about Murray’s deserving his $500 back: “The fact that the requested documents were produced . . . after the action was commenced, but prior to final adjudication of the issue by the trial court, does not render the case moot or preclude consideration of [the petitioner’s] entitlement to fees under the statute.”

     The Sunshine Law is pointedly designed to encourage voluntary, not lawsuit-driven compliance: Since 1993, “If public agencies are required to pay attorney’s fees and costs to parties who are wrongfully denied access to the records of such agencies, then the agencies are less likely to deny proper requests for documents. . . attorney’s fees are recoverable even where access is denied on a good faith but mistaken belief that the documents are exempt from disclosure.”

     So Murray is about as right as right can be, and the district dead wrong. But Murray, the reasonable man in this issue, waited to see if the school board would decide to settle his case for the measly but symbolic $500. Amazingly, the five citizens we elected to serve our, the public’s rights, voted as a group NOT to enforce the Sunshine Law the way it is clearly meant to be enforced.

     While Murray was waiting, a single paragraph in the Sunshine book did him in: He only had a short period to file his appeal, which he missed. So the District spent much more than $500 in their own legal costs to triumphantly wave that paragraph before the judge, and, Gotcha! the judge has no choice.

     Worse than the triumphalism of their “Ha-ha, we got you on a technicality” was their repeating their original and clearly wrong argument, wrong as a matter of overwhelming precedent, that the case was “moot.” Can’t the district’s legal team understand court opinions, even when the salient points are highlighted for them? They don’t have counter-rulings to those I quoted; they just ignore them.

     Now, if the district’s legal team is as bone-headed and, the legal term is “malicious,” as the county’s, they are champing at the bit to sue Murray for their own legal fees, a nutso idea under the law but too consonant with what they and the county have already done. Maybe the Board will learn from the mistakes of the county commission in the SUFA case and not only back off, but vote to give Murray the $500 the Sunshine Law clearly says he deserves.

     District and Board, you work for us. We are your employers. Your work product is for us to read and understand. Don’t break our laws twice in, first, refusing Murray’s legal requests, and then, second, denying him his rightful remedy. How can you teach our kids to do the right thing, when you publicly and repeatedly flout our laws?

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