Critics urge faster access to info
One person’s transparency is another’s opacity, when it comes to opposing visions for the city.
In recent weeks, Mayor Jeri Muoio revived a plan to create a downtown zoning district that would allow a 25-story office tower in a 5-story zone near the waterfront, a plan that promises to attract high-paying hedge funds but threatens to block neighbors’ views and gridlock the Okeechobee Corridor.
The proposal touched off a battle not just over the future of the waterfront but over city willingness to provide copies of the revised Okeechobee Business District plan, a public record, in time for citizens to review them to comment at city meetings.
Development Services Director Rick Greene said he and his staff work as hard as they can to complete their analyses in time for meetings. But a citizens group attorney, the president of a second citizens group and a downtown resident are frustrated at getting the city to respond to requests for the revised plan, and at the city not producing even drafts of the plan, which was dozens of pages long.
“These are complicated documents. If a citizen can’t get access to it, how do they respond to it intelligently? They can’t,” said Barbara Petersen, president of the First Amendment Foundation, an open records watchdog. “I just don’t understand the delay.”
The Okeechobee Business District failed to win city commission support last September by a one-vote margin, but with two new commissioners on board and a new mobility study in hand to offer traffic solutions, the mayor asked the development staff to revise and resubmit the plan. It went to the Planning Board May 16, where it got a 3-2 thumbs-up. It heads to the Downtown Action Committee June 13 and to the full commission for final approval or rejection, June 18.
John Eubanks, attorney for Preserve West Palm Beach Citizens Coalition Inc., submitted a detailed request for information to the city clerk May 3, well in advance of the Planning board meeting. Eubanks said the documents he got back didn’t match his request.
Similarly, downtown resident Terri Gillman on May 5 asked Greene’s department to provide documents “for me to understand what the proposals are.” She got an email back, saying the plan would be “ready or public review by the end of the day, Friday May 11,” two business days before the Tuesday, May 16 meeting. That was Mother’s Day weekend, so there wasn’t much time to review anything, Gillman said. A Development Services official offered to answer questions on the phone, but Gillman wanted the materials in hand to study them.
Even if the report wasn’t done, Petersen said, the city should have provided a draft. The minute that someone working on a report sends it to someone else for comment or review, it’s considered a draft, she said. And under Florida law a draft report is a public record. “The law says, and it’s well settled, there is no ‘unfinished business’ exception to the public records law, so a draft is subject to disclosure.”
If the plan opponents are frustrated, so is development director Greene, who said his staff raced to get the plan done. They try to get Planning Board materials finished the Friday before Tuesday evening meetings and that’s what they’ve done for 20 years, he said. That gives the public Friday evening, Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday to read the reports. he said. If staff can finish a day early, they do, he added.
“We try to be transparent. So when they play the card, we’re holding stuff, it irritates me. That’s the opposite of what we do.”