Filing asks to toss bid to get Beebe papers

Months after losing a challenge to get access to documents from the office of Gov. Mike Beebe, the executive director of the state’s Republican party requested that the state’s high court toss her lawsuit against the outgoing governor.

On Thursday, Megan Tollett submitted a motion to the Arkansas Supreme Court asking to dismiss her case, which was filed with the court in August after Pulaski County Circuit Judge Mary McGowan ruled against Tollett’s effort to compel Beebe to disclose documents regarding his appointments to state commissions and boards.

A call to Tollett was not returned Thursday but her filing said she did not expect Beebe to be “prejudice[d]” by the motion because the prior ruling fell “in his favor.”

Though state attorneys have yet to respond, Beebe spokesman Matt DeCample said Tollett’s motion to discontinue the case was welcome.

“We never thought it should have been filed in the first place,” DeCample said. “We’ll be fine with it being dismissed.”

Tollett’s legal fight for access to documents began in late 2013 when Beebe’s office denied Tollett’s requests, made under the state’s Freedom of Information law, for documents regarding applications for appointments.

She filed suit against Beebe in December 2013 and asked the court to compel Beebe to disclose the application materials.

The attorney general’s office argued that the documents were exempt from the Freedom of Information law because they qualified as “working papers” of the governor’s office, and thus, were not subject to disclosure.

Tollett’s attorneys argued that they do not fit the statute protecting the governor’s documents because they were “not ‘published’” but rather, sent to him by individuals outside the office and that they weren’t proper “working papers” because they were not prepared by Beebe or his staff.

In August, McGowan sided with Beebe after she applied a “balancing test” for weighing the interests of the public, and those applying for boards and commissions in state government.

In her opinion, she found that disclosure would present a “chilling effect” to applicants who wouldn’t want certain information disclosed to the public that they felt they needed to share with Beebe’s office in order to be appointed.