Most of Racine public records suit finally unsealed
A secret 2017 lawsuit over Racine public records that the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel exposed last fall has finally been unsealed, for the most part, after news media and open records advocates intervened.
Late last week, Sandra Weidner v. the City of Racine suddenly appeared on the state’s online court records system, or CCAP, along with a general docket of events in the case. And at the Racine County Courthouse, interested people can now read the extensive pleadings, though many have had portions censored.
“I’d certainly characterize what’s happened as a victory for open government and the courts,” said Brian Spahn, a lawyer with Godfrey & Kahn who represented the news media in the case.
Bill Lueders, president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, argued there was never a reason to seal any of the file, and doing so made the city and the judge look foolish.
“This is Wisconsin, not some banana republic; we do not have secret city councils or secret courts,” Lueders said. “The public officials here have abused the public’s trust and wasted its money. This whole case is outrageous.”
The newly available records only make it more curious why a judge would have sealed them in the first place, while the remaining redactions beg the question of what was really driving the secrecy.
When the Journal Sentinel reported about the case in September, there was no public record of it at all. By then, Racine Ald. Sandy Weidner had appealed Racine County Circuit Judge Eugene Gasiorkiewicz’s decision to dismiss her lawsuit seeking a series of emails from the city.
The case remained under seal at the Court of Appeals, where lawyers for the Journal Sentinel, USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Newspaper Association, Wisconsin Broadcasters Association and the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council sought to intervene.
The appellate court granted the intervention and sent the case back to Gasiorkiewicz to reconsider his absolute seal order, this time with input from the news media lawyers.
At a closed hearing Dec. 5, the judge and lawyers for Weidner, the city and the outside groups went over the case’s documents. Gasiorkiewicz agreed to unseal most of them and to allow the city to redact portions of others.
The case started in the late summer of 2017 when Weidner was running for mayor against eventual winner Cory Mason.
That August, Weidner said the whole council was invited to a meeting of the Executive Committee at which, she said, City Attorney Scott Letteney displayed dozens of slides of emails between his office and aldermen that he suggested were possible ethical violations and got the committee to agree to seek an advisory opinion from the city’s Board of Ethics.
Weidner saw the presentation as an attack on her and feared it would be exploited to hurt her campaign. She requested copies of the materials in Letteney’s presentation and was denied twice so she sued in December 2017 under the state’s open records law.
The city persuaded Gasiorkiewicz to ban spectators at the first hearing. He sealed the entire case and eventually agreed with the city that the emails were exempt from disclosure because they were covered by attorney-client privilege.
After Weidner spoke to the Journal Sentinel, in apparent violation of Gasiorkiewicz’s gag rule, he granted the city’s request that she be found in contempt.