City officials aim for ‘middle ground’ on creation of FOIA library

Richmond policymakers want more time to study their options before moving forward with legislation to boost government transparency by creating an online Freedom of Information Act library.

Mayor Danny Avula’s administration and City Council members seem to agree the city should establish a public records library. But there’s no consensus yet on what government documents should go into the library and what should be kept out.

On Wednesday, a Council committee heard competing FOIA library proposals, one filed by Councilor Kenya Gibson (3rd District) and the other filed by the Avula administration.

The committee didn’t advance either plan, choosing instead to keep trying to hash out differences that were aired at Wednesday’s hearing.

“I think we might be able to find a middle ground between these two bills,” said Councilor Sarah Abubaker (4th District), a co-sponsor of Gibson’s FOIA library concept.

The Avula administration argued Gibson’s proposal could create more risk that sensitive information could be posted online. Releasing records under FOIA to one person who asked for them, said communications director Ross Catrow, is fundamentally different from publishing records for anyone to find and potentially “misuse.”

“We’re really trying to get the most information possible out to the public while doing the least amount of harm and with the least amount of cost,” Catrow told the Council committee as he pitched Avula’s proposal.

Gibson pushed back, saying the administration was raising largely hypothetical concerns and trying to maintain a system where government officials pick and choose what documents are and aren’t posted online for the public’s benefit.

Gibson said that, to her, it sounded like the administration was asking the public to simply trust City Hall’s internal decisions about what should go into a FOIA library.

“The objective of this paper is that City Hall earns the trust through being more transparent,” Gibson said.

The original FOIA library proposal from Gibson called for nearly every FOIA request and response to be included. After the administration raised concerns about costs and the possibility of broadcasting sensitive information about law enforcement or social services matters, Gibson amended her proposal to exclude FOIA requests dealing with the Richmond Police Department, the Richmond Fire Department, the Department of Social Services and the Department of Emergency Communications, Preparedness and Response.

Asked Wednesday why she had excluded those departments, Gibson said she was attempting to respond to the administration’s concerns and bring down the $350,000 price tag the administration had attached to her proposal.

“My first order of business was essentially to provide more transparency in this building,” Gibson said, referring to the core government functions like finances and spending that take place in City Hall.

The Avula administration proposed a more narrowly tailored FOIA library that would include records requested by two or more people that city officials deem to be in the public interest, relevant to government accountability and not susceptible to misuse.

Gibson said she felt it was “a big miss” for the administration to not clearly spell out those terms in the legislation Avula proposed, but Catrow said the administration routinely deals with novel FOIA situations that make it difficult to legislate what the right call should be for each one.

Megan Rhyne, a statewide transparency advocate who serves as executive director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government, testified at Wednesday’s hearing in support of Gibson’s proposal. She said Richmond had an opportunity to be in the “vanguard” of transparency reforms in Virginia by adopting a model policy that could spread to other cities, counties and school boards.

Rhyne said some of the issues the Avula administration was raising — such as the possibility that records involving children would end up published in the library — weren’t applicable because FOIA law already includes numerous exemptions protecting records involving kids.

Addressing the administration’s concerns about “weaponized” FOIA requests being in the library that could make accusations against someone, Rhyne argued that’s not a compelling reason to limit what goes into the library.

“Yes, someone might misuse public records to embarrass a neighbor. And yes, that kind of thing already happens every day on social media,” Rhyne said. “But what the public worries about is something much larger. And that’s that records might be withheld from the library or never posted at all to avoid embarrassing a government employee or the government itself.”

Catrow said he was concerned about requesters abusing the FOIA library’s public nature by filing requests that make baseless accusations that produce no relevant records.

“It implies that there is something someone is looking for,” Catrow said.

Though Catrow acknowledged the city doesn’t receive those types of requests currently, Avula Chief of Staff Lawson Wijesooriya said she had spoken to one unnamed Council member who felt they had been targeted by “bad faith” FOIA requests.

“We are already dealing with requests that are people looking for dirt that’s not actually there,” Wijesooriya said.

Abubaker said the situation the mayor’s chief of staff raised shows how FOIA requests can be “subject to interpretation” depending on which side you’re on, and a well-crafted FOIA library would presumably remove some of that subjectivity.

“One woman’s request for records may feel like another woman’s personal attack,” Abubaker said.

Gibson suggested that only her proposal advance, but Abubaker and Councilor Katherine Jordan (2nd District) voted to continue both versions until next months’ meeting of the Council’s Governmental Operations Committee.

In the meantime, officials will continue to think over possible tweaks.

Contact Reporter Graham Moomaw at gmoomaw@richmonder.org