Public integrity dies without transparency
Last July, Greg Brockhouse submitted a massive open-records request with the city of San Antonio.
In anticipation of workforce development and public-transit proposition campaigns he planned to oppose, the former councilman wanted to be armed with as much information as possible on related communications from Mayor Ron Nirenberg and his staff members.
Eight months passed and Brockhouse received no documents from the city.
So, last Thursday, Brockhouse, who is challenging Nirenberg for mayor, fired off a press release threatening to sue the city over its lack of transparency.
The very next day, the city finally began providing Brockhouse with some of the material he requested last summer.
This incident comes on the heels of transparency questions with regard to the arrest of Fire Chief Charles Hood’s teenage son last June at the San Antonio International Airport.
Hood’s son was arrested on suspicion of possessing a fake ID and providing false information to a police officer. The arrest created a rift between Hood, who thought the arrest was unwarranted, and Police Chief William Mcmanus, who stood by his officers.
The incident also prompted the city to pay $325 an hour to a mediation specialist hired to make sense of what happened.
This was a story the public had every right to know about.
For six months, however, the city failed to comply with openrecords requests from Expressnews reporter Emilie Eaton for the arrest report. Ultimately, the arrest report was expunged.
As of Monday, April 5, the city had 10,505 pending open records requests, with 6,964 (66 percent) of those requests having been submitted at least a month earlier, according to information provided by the city.
No matter who you support in the mayor’s race, no matter what you think of the police chief or the fire chief, this issue
should concern you.
Ethical government requires guardrails. Public integrity dies without transparency.
Of course, the issue of government transparency has been complicated over the past year, just like everything else in our lives, by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Last April, the office of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton informed government officials that, in light of the pandemic, they could suspend their adherence to the deadlines of the Texas Public Information Act.
State law requires government entities to respond to open records requests within 10 business days.
The AG’S COVID guidelines, however, indicated that days in which a government department has closed its physical offices shouldn’t be counted as business days. The same applied to days in which only a skeleton crew was working.
Under this opinion, governmental bodies throughout the state have had free cover to indefinitely drag out their responses to public-records requests.
When you’re simultaneously facing public-health and economic crises, it might be hard to get worked up over a government-transparency problem. But we need to get worked up over it.
Over the past three months, Paxton has resisted the coordinated efforts of the Houston Chronicle, Express-news, Dallas Morning News, Austin American-statesman, Texas Tribune and Propublica to get him to turn over messages he sent or received while in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6 for the pro-donald Trump rally preceding the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
To the city’s credit, it voluntarily returned last November to its PRE-COVID guidelines for open records responses. But Brockhouse’s press release pointed out he submitted a series of requests in February and hadn’t yet received any information.
Jeff Coyle, San Antonio’s assistant city manager, said the city has begun turning over material cited in Brockhouse’s February request.
“An open records request shouldn’t take as long as his did from July,” Coyle said. “But these were extraordinary circumstances and we’ve had other big ones that are still pending also.”
To be fair, Brockhouse’s request last July was massive. Coyle said city staffers have so far pulled a total of 195,000 emails and are scouring them to see which are genuinely responsive to Brockhouse’s request.
With regard to the city’s handling of the arrest report for Hood’s son, Coyle provided this statement:
“The delay in the release of those records was attributable to a number of factors, including the commitment of resources to Covid-related open records requests, a review of the matter and subsequent legal activity.”
Brockhouse describes the city’s handling of open records requests as a “running joke” and adds that he hasn’t yet shut the door on the possibility of filing a lawsuit over it.
As the city works through its backlog of pandemic-period requests, hopefully we’ll see a more consistent adherence to the principle of open government.