Sandiego.nextrequest.com screenshot
Imagine the sheer quantity of public records at your fingertips.
Last week, we published a piece about Johnnie Perkins, the man who will have one of the most important positions in Spokane city government, Mayor Nadine Woodward's city administrator.
Perkins came from San Diego, where a real estate deal gone bad — imagine Spokane's River Park Square parking garage debacle, if you were to throw on chunks of asbestos and a dangerously flawed fire safety system — had collapsed into a multi-year scandal that has sparked multiple lawsuits.
Perkins, as one of San Diego's deputy chief operating officers, had played a pivotal role in overseeing the 101 Ash Street project's troubled renovations in 2019 and 2020.
But Perkins himself offered few specifics about his involvement with the project when pressed by the Inlander, repeatedly shrugging off specific questions with vague generalities like "we all face and are given challenges and opportunities in our life," "all major projects present their own unique circumstances" and "public safety is a top priority first, second, and always."
It's an issue that has been swarmed over by lawyers, council members, city-hired-consultant investigations and numerous local media outlets. But most of their reporting wasn't focused specifically on what the Inlander wanted to find out: What did Perkins know and what did he do during the projects' most troubled months?
That's where public records can be so important: The problem is that public records requests can often take months to be fulfilled, and the Inlander only had a week or so to research the story.
But, it turned out, San Diego's records system let us find what we were looking for in a matter of seconds. When the city of San Diego releases public records requests, it doesn't just send the documents to the person who requested them.
It also uploads the records to a searchable database called NextRequest. Over 25,000 record requests are instantly searchable.
The Inlander was quickly able to find records showing Perkins personally intervening to deal with asbestos screwups by subcontractors, but also records of contractors and city employees warning Perkins and other city officials about a slew of problems before people moved into the building: an obsolete heating and ventilation system, corroded sewer piping, clogged asbestos tests, a whistleblower raising red flags, a flawed fire system the fire marshal never signed off on, and an unrealistic timetable driven by "significant political pressure."
Go ahead, try it out. Search "Perkins" or "Ash Street" or "fire alarms" or, for that matter, "San Diego Padres" and get a bunch of documents instantly available for download.
It's exactly the sort of open public records portal that City Council President Breean Beggs and Councilman Michael Cathcart want to bring to Spokane.
"Once the city has already done all the work," Beggs says, "it lowers the barrier for anybody looking into it."
Beggs even suggests that because the city was so slow to release records because of pandemic restrictions, the city might be able to spend COVID relief money on getting caught up with the backlogged records or upgrading the records system.
Beggs says he started developing his proposal in 2018, focusing on the delays associated with public records requests in the police department. In the years since, he's expanded the scope to apply to city records across the board.
In a Facebook message, Cathcart writes that he also wants "to see if there is a way to create time-sensitive prioritization and make it so that crime victims can get a copy of any police report [concerning their incident] immediately upon request."
The city of Spokane and Spokane County both use GovQA, a records request system that easily allows for making public records, well, public.
With some records, Spokane County has done just that with their "Public Records Archives" tab. But right now, only 18 records from the last 3 years have been uploaded.
Tony Dinaro, the Spokane County Public Records Officer, says that uploading everything can add additional complexity for the public records staff.
"Sometimes people put in the text of the request things we wouldn’t want to release," he says.
A mother, for example, might request records pertaining to the arrest of her juvenile son using his name, Dinaro, or an attorney might include extensive details about a person's case in his request. In both cases, additional details would need to be redacted if their request was shared.
And what happens, Dinaro asks, when the state Legislature changes its records laws, like when it curtailed the amount of information available about harassment complaints? Does that mean that he would have to go through and redact all the old available records?
With some records, Spokane County has done just that with their "Public Records Archives" tab. But right now, only 18 records from the last 3 years have been uploaded.
Tony Dinaro, the Spokane County Public Records Officer, says that uploading everything can add additional complexity for the public records staff.
"Sometimes people put in the text of the request things we wouldn’t want to release," he says.
A mother, for example, might request records pertaining to the arrest of her juvenile son using his name, Dinaro, or an attorney might include extensive details about a person's case in his request. In both cases, additional details would need to be redacted if their request was shared.
And what happens, Dinaro asks, when the state Legislature changes its records laws, like when it curtailed the amount of information available about harassment complaints? Does that mean that he would have to go through and redact all the old available records?
Still, he says, "I think the more stuff that’s out there that’s publicly available the better."
In fact, the previous Spokane mayor's city administrator, Theresa Sanders, told the Inlander in 2019 that she supported dramatically expanding records access.
"I have always been a huge fan of releasing records of all kinds," Sanders said. "To me, we know we work in a public environment. That's part of the gig. I'm like, 'I would love it. Go scan my emails. Look at my stuff. '"
In fact, the previous Spokane mayor's city administrator, Theresa Sanders, told the Inlander in 2019 that she supported dramatically expanding records access.
"I have always been a huge fan of releasing records of all kinds," Sanders said. "To me, we know we work in a public environment. That's part of the gig. I'm like, 'I would love it. Go scan my emails. Look at my stuff. '"
Five years ago, Sanders was facing an investigation into whether the city of Spokane intentionally withheld records concerning sexual harassment allegations against a former police chief. Sanders continued to deny she had been involved with slow-walking the records. Despite — or because of — that scandal, Sanders argued that transparency is the ideal to go.
"I think actually having that kind of access would reduce the mistrust and speculation," she says. "Speculation is the dangerous thing, really." ♦
