Hoxie’s hijinks continue to heighten
Recall my recent reporting about Hoxie city attorney Nancy Hall not providing a police officer’s personnel file and body-camera video (one day’s worth) to a local citizen seeking records pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act. Hall asserted a made-up exemption due to the then-pending special-legislative session.
After the requester included me in his ongoing email exchange with Hall and I implored her to comply with the law, she turned over the personnel file but not the video. Hall erroneously stated that the city wasn’t required to provide the recording, because Hoxie didn’t own redaction software.
When I referred Hall to my FOIA treatise, she called me an ass, declared herself uninterested in my book, and demanded I not write to the email she was using and signed “City Attorney,” because it was her personal account—all while ignoring the requester’s entreaty for her “work” email.
After the requester followed up, Hall wrote this from that same email—still signed “City Attorney”:
“This request was already answered. There is nothing further to add.
“Just need the requestor to state if he wishes to pay the fee for extraction of the footage or not. Simple yes or no does it— he may thereafter inspect the footage or request it to be downloaded on a thumb drive for his purchase. Up to him.
“With these requests, just extract what is being requested, if anything. Suggestions and feedback of the requestor is not necessary to respond to. FOIA simply requires that the City provide copies of those items that are kept in the ordinary course of business. The videos do not meet that definition unless extracted. If we have paid to have this copy extracted for some reason, then we should provide a copy at our cost. It is my understanding that we have not had any reason to pay a third party technician to extract files at this time.
“The citizens of Hoxie do not wish to purchase expensive software with funds that could be used on the roads and for the public good just to assure [the requester] and other non-citizen third parties do not have to pay for their personal requests.
“The ‘conversate before I litigate’ is a quote from the pompous attorney who currently does not hold a license to practice in Arkansas but apparently is good at getting published and teaching at the UALR law school? and getting news reporters to listen as he misrepresents the contents of my prior emails.” Let’s unpack this.
Hall says the “FOIA simply requires that the City provide copies of those items that are kept in the ordinary course of business. The videos do not meet that definition unless extracted.”
Hall’s wrong. How the video is kept is not the test—notwithstanding that the video clearly is kept in the ordinary course of business. And Hall does have to redact exempt material, as the law explicitly mandates: “[n]o request … shall be denied on the ground that information exempt from disclosure is commingled with nonexempt information.”
Remarkably, shortly after Hall sent this screed, Hoxie’s new police chief released the recording.
The upside to Hall’s repeated wrongful refusals to comply with the FOIA prior to the city doing the opposite is that the next time a cabal of whining bureaucrats, FOIA-attacking legislators, and private lobbyists—the Municipal League and Association of Arkansas Counties— claim the FOIA is abused, I’ll use this example (amongst others) to agree. But my description will aptly present abuse by government.
Hall further claimed, “[t]he ‘conversate before I litigate’ is a quote from the pompous attorney who currently does not hold a license to practice in Arkansas but apparently is good at getting published and teaching at the UALR law school? and getting news reporters to listen as he misrepresents the contents of my prior emails.” Huzzah—another column reader! Nothing like such reasoned analysis to give Hoxie further notoriety after Hoxie’s hammered then-police chief faced the hoosegow for hocking his heater.
As to the particulars of this portion of Hall’s harangue, I didn’t invent “conversate before litigate.” But the next time FOIA foes, including a blithely ignorant executive-branch attorney testifying in the Legislature, foolishly assert that lawyers representing FOIA requesters do it for the potential-government pittance, recall that settling cases prior to suing—that is, “conversating before litigating”—provides for zero attorney’s fees.
Thereafter, Hall mysteriously manufactured that I don’t hold an Arkansas law license. Uh, yeah, I do. But on the flip side, Hall was spot on in asserting that I’m “good at getting published and teaching at the UALR law school.”
This might be the only time Hall and I agree—although she curiously completed her concession with a mid-sentence question mark. Is she uncertain? I’m not.
Hall’s tirade concluded by falsely complaining that I misrepresented her prior emails. So I included every word of her more recent jeremiad here.
I don’t think it helps her cause. What do you think?
This is your right to know.