Last updated on 2017-10-21
Senator Billie Sutton offers two draft bills for the Government Operations and Audit Committee’s consideration today (or maybe tomorrow) in Sioux Falls.
The Democratic gubernatorial candidate offers one tweak of the lengthy list of exemptions the Legislature has crafted to South Dakota’s open records laws. He would strike Section 12 of SDCL 1-27-1.5, which currently keeps secret “Correspondence, memoranda, calendars or logs of appointments, working papers, and records of telephone calls of public officials or employees.”
Working papers—hmm… would that be like the “draft report” on his event center’s shoddy siding that Mayor Mike Huether thinks he can keep secret from his constituents?
Senator Sutton and his fellow GOAC members should note that striking this section would not make all memoranda public documents. SDCL 1-27-1.7 would still say, “Drafts, notes, recommendations, and memoranda in which opinions are expressed or policies formulated or recommended are exempt from disclosure pursuant to §§ 1-27-1 to 1-27-1.15, inclusive.” If Senator Sutton wants to increase transparency on internal policy-making documents, he might want to include that later statute in his draft bill.
Senator Sutton would change a second public documents law, SDCL 1-27-13, by adding a requirement that state agencies retain fiscal records for at least ten years. That change wouldn’t affect the state’s swift e-mail deletion policy, which left us unable to access possibly key evidence from Richard Benda and other players in the EB-5 scandal, but it at least makes clear how long Pierre has to keep official information the use of our tax dollars.
But only ten years? Some of us like to be able to compare budget information from past decades and figure out really long-term trends. Come on—we have computers and lots of space. Require a perpetual archive, with servers in a nice safe vault at the Homestake Lab!
This is highly abused in city of Sioux Falls by the city attorney’s office :
Section (4) Records which consist of attorney work product or which are subject to any privilege recognized in article V of chapter 19-19;
This needs to be modified to force our two timing city attorney’s office which is governed by Home Rule Charter to represent the Council, Mayor and the employees. Our structure is a great example of institutional conflict of interest. It means everything they do is attorney client privilege.
We have an additional set of problems. Our current city attorney who is leaving is telling our Council he will not answer anymore questions concerning his time in office when he walks out on October 31, 2017.
This attorney is likely to leave with a personal hard drive{s} upon leaving office. In order to protect themselves from future retribution from our “strong mayor” form of government, anyone in city government who can, saves information on personal hard drives they take with them when they leave office. We have no way to know what is being taken out of the building or the secrets they were involved in. We as citizens will not know what has happened under their watch.
We are supposed to have a records retention policy each employee is to follow, from experience several have found records doctored. Here yesterday, modified today and gone tomorrow.
State law must be changed to prevent information from being removed from public scrutiny and reach. Our city attorney office is constantly claiming privileged while working at cross purposes. Our city attorney structure is a walking example of conflict of interest. What can be done with this problem?
As citizen activists, we have been saving public city videos with other records because our a town under its current mayor has decided to sanitize his record http://www.siouxfall.org. We’ve also created a searchable system with videos of Council Chamber actions http://www.sfmeetings.org. These websites have been done because of the destruction of so much our our towns history. State law must be changed to stop a city attorney from claiming everything is attorney client privilege and then leave so they don’t have to answer for their work. Work they were over paid to show up for.