A handful of Columbus citizens, centered around former mayor Kristen Brown, have filed dozens of complaints, requests and inquiries with the city since Brown left office last year.
Current Mayor Jim Lienhoop says that many of these requests were trivial and costs the city thousands of dollars in time and resources.
“It is part of what you have to accept, if you are in government,” Lienhoop said. “You have to abide by the law and the law says we have to respond to these requests, and so we will,” Lienhoop said.
He said the administration wants to fulfill the requests fully and completely, which takes time.
“If we don’t, we trigger another round of complaints,” Lienhoop said.
Lienhoop brought up his frustration with the deluge of requests at a City Council meeting last month and asked the former mayor and those sympathetic to her to stop the flood.
“What I was wanting to do, was simply to make the public aware that we have got this extra cost, that they probably didn’t know about.”
That led to four more requests for information from the same group, Lienhoop said recently.
Clerk Treasurer Luann Welmer has been keeping a tally (20161025-tally-of-public-requests PDF Download) of all of the various public information requests received since the start of the year, dividing them into informal or email requests, formal requests and complaints to the state access counselor. Brown and her supporters Kenneth Fudge and Dave Jones had filed 17 informal requests, 22 public information requests and seven complaints with the state.
In one of the earlier requests, Fudge wanted to know why Mary Ferdon, the city’s director of administration, sits near him during Redevelopment Commission and Council meetings. He also requested a copy of an note passed between Welmer and Ferdon during a Board of Public Works and Safety meeting.
So far this year, the Indiana public access counselor has made two advisory opinions in relation to Columbus available through his website.
The first is in regards to a complaint by Fudge and Jones about the makeup and Open Door requirements of a Redevelopment Department subcommittee on railroad improvements. Link to PDF file
The public access counselor, Luke Britt, advised: “Based upon the information provided, the committee was not directly appointed by the Commission or its presiding officer to take official action upon public business. ”
In the second opinion, Brown wanted more detailed information about a fire run than the Columbus Fire Department kept on hand. Link to PDF file.
In that complaint, the public access counselor sides with the fire department.
“It appears as if the CFD has identified and sent the specific information it had available and referred you to send requests to Bartholomew Country Operations Center. It extrapolated information from your request and identified documents to satisfy it. You were provided with all the information he had available in firehouse records as you requested. ”
White River Broadcasting obtained the list of public information requests, through a public information request itself. We also requested a tally of all the associated costs involved with fulfilling the requests of the former mayor and her supporters, but have not received that tally.
The state complaints have led the city to make one policy change, Lienhoop said.
“Kristen Brown made a request for some copies not too long ago that resulted in a charge of $3.15,” Lienhoop said. “If you re-read the state statute, it would seem to be that maybe we should have charged her $2.80. So maybe, we overcharged her by 35 cents.”
Jones takes issue with Lienhoop’s assertion that these requests are wasting city resources.
“If we want to talk about wasting taxpayers dollars we can go back to Jim Lienhoop spearheading a lawsuit against the city and the former mayor when she fired Ben Wagner as parks director,” Jones said. “And that was well over $10,000 in legal expenses, just for that one incident.”
Jones laid the number and frequency of the requests at the feet of the new mayor and his staff.
“If this administration were more open, more transparent and actually produced the documents they say they are going to . produce when asked, this administration wouldn’t have as many requests as it does,” Jones said.
Neither Brown nor Fudge could be reached for comment.
