04/12/2006: "Court Orders County To Pay Fine & Release Notes"

As The Island Guardian's Piet Visser did research for a Column on the purchase of land by the County by Public Works, he requested copies of documents from the County so that he might be able to report on the facts of the purchase, as background for what turned out be a series of columns on how the County conducts the business of the people.

When Visser's request for relevant documents was processed, someone in County government decided that certain documents were not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, because they were "personal notes…or are considered protected by the attorney-client privilege". As one might expect, Mr. Visser was curious how "notes" dealing with official county business, and made on county time, could be personal, and/or protected, from the eyes of the public due to an attorney-client privilege.

When Visser persisted in his request, he was told "If you wish to challenge this conclusion you may file an action in Superior Court pursuant to RCW 42.17.340 and ask the court to determine whether the listed documents are, in fact, public records that should have been disclosed.". This also seemed odd to Visser, he expected the County would be the one to go to court to stop from having to release the documents to Visser. But according to the record, the County Council instructed the Prosecutors office to not go to court, because they did not want the County to be suing one of their own citizens. Better the citizen sue the County to obtain information pertaining to County business, seemed to be their view on the matter

Visser went to court. Visser won, the County lost. End result of the County not releasing official documentation on the spending of 1.8 million dollars for a piece of property was the County paying Visser $885.00 in penalty as required, and $9,351.30 in attorney fees and costs incurred by Visser. What does not show up in the Court Order is how much it cost the County in loss time and effort to fight the release of the information. Visser Column on the subject

The big question in Visser's mind was what, exactly was so important in the information that the Council and Public Works did not want anyone to see it, or did not think anyone in the public had the right to see it? The odd thing about the whole thing is that the answer to those questions seems to be: not much -unless we are all missing something. One sentence that does jump out, is a note made by Jon Shannon on the results of an Executive Session held by the Board of County Commissioners (now the County Council) that indicates all three of the Commissioners were in favor of purchasing Kellsey South for use by Public Works, and that the use would include a Transfer Station (commonly called a "dump"), and "especially Kevin Ranker" was in favor of it. The rest of the notes dealt with the details of the purchase. It is simply not clear why the County would go to such lengths -and waste of tax dollars- to keep the press and the public in the dark on these details of a land acquisition, after the deal had closed, and the details of the deal could have no bearing on the purchase.