4 -- How the
Commission Illegally Ignored Public Records Requests
ARTICLE
TOPICS:
The Commission is doing better on fulfilling
public records requests after a poor showing
Public
Records Laws
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There are several issues to
discuss on this page. If the Commission for the Reconstruction of the Virginia
& Truckee Railway Tourist Railroad had never tried to get $10 million more
from Carson City, no one would be paying attention to this stuff.
PUBLIC
/ OPEN RECORDS LAWS AND SLOW RESPONSE TIME
The reason the public is
looking at the railroad project more closely is that Carson City Mayor Marv
Teixeira is asking for $10 million more from Carsonites after Carson City has
provided $21 million of the $37 million in funding. In my case, if the meeting
minutes had been posted properly, I probably never would have attended my first
meeting in February, 2008. Commission meetings are like a soap opera (or
heroin), if you watch one you're hooked!
So I became interested in the
details of the project. I knew that after ten years the Gray's had lost their
opportunity to operate the railroad, assuming it's ever finished. I was
interested in the operator selection process, the total cost of the project,
the minutes for meetings that weren't posted on the website and an updated list
of the Commissioners, as the list on the website was old. I sent my first
public records request on February 5, 2008. It took a couple months to get a
response -- the Project Coordinator said my email were being sent to his junk
folder. Only in the second half of 2008 did the Commission finally begin
following Nevada's Public
Records laws by providing the documents I was asking for, for months in
some cases!
The document that took the longest were the qualifications
documents. When the Commission "threw the Gray's under the bus" and chose
Sierra Railroad, they had an operator selection process. Many operators were
considered and finally in Phase 2 three finalists submitted documents showing
their qualifications.
The
Sierra doc (21Mb PDF) is on renorailfans.com in a poor-quality format. For
months I was told that these documents were not public records because they
contained private financial information about the railroads.
Finally the
Commission realized they could simply redact a few pages of information and
give out the rest of the documents. I finally got copies to review, but, as
noted, it took months! There are too many horror stories of the Commission
violating open records law to mention here. Finally Bob Hadfield got the
message and publicly told Kevin Ray to provide all records that are requested
per Nevada law. Finally! Now my requests are being filled in a reasonable
timeframe.
I'll leave you with one more story, a real problem, where the
Project Attorney Mike Rowe intentionally ignored a records request, against
state law. If the government body decides not to provide the requested records,
they have five days to notify the requester in writing of the reason why.
Dennis Johnson made a request and was ignored for weeks. I didn't really cover
this in the August meeting notes, so here goes:
I knew that Dennis had
not gotten a response, and I similarly had not received a response on one of my
requests. I spoke to Attorney Mike Rowe before the meeting and said I was
shocked that he hadn't responded. Mike explained that one reason is that he has
to charge the Commission to handle these requests and his hourly rate is
expensive. So much for all the free time Rowe and Dorr supposedly give to the
project. In Dennis case, Mike Rowe gave bogus reasons for not answering his
requests.
The proof is in the pudding. By the next meeting our
complaints bore fruit -- Dennis and I were both able to review the records that
hadn't been provided. |