Hi there, happy America 250. However, we have some hard news to address. Hopefully everyone got good views of the elected officials that care:
Sedro-Woolley Mayor JoEllen Kesti
Also the fireworks:
Author Photo
First I know I owe us an in-depth review of British Columbia’s recent freedom of information developments. But it’s been a week… having to triage projects at this point.
Second, we finally had the Attorney General’s Office Public Records Act Model Rules Update hearing last Tuesday. One can watch the TVW coverage below:
A few early themes have come out from both the oral comments & written comments I’ve been able to see. Most of the whining this time came from the educational industrial complex, so if anyone thinks 2027 is going to cool the cold war on public records - think again, because the educational industrial complex is hammering home their arguments.
a) Whining over moving public records away from personal devices to public servers by various public servants. The current recommended 5 day deadline forgets that public records are public records and public records can be stored in this thing called “the cloud” - e.g. Google Drive.
b) Continued complaints over triating. As The Center Square reported, Candice Bock of the Association of Washington Cities shared,
“Requiring or encouraging classifying requests as either simple or complex sounds straightforward, but it puts public records officers in the position of determining what’s simple, what is complex, similarly with time sensitive. It puts them in the position of determining what is time sensitive and what is not urgent. We feel like this could really have requesters pitted against one another for the limited time and resources that are available and put a records officer in a position of trying to arbitrate over those questions, just really creating more liability.”
However, as I pointed out - and was thankfully mentioned by the Center Square - response times to public records deterred me from asking say a Port or even a public transit for public records for most of my 3 years, 3 months working with an aviation journalism firm. It’s because I couldn’t ask editors to wait due to slow public records production months for even a feature.
There’s more to this, but I have a very busy week between editing video + Aviation Expo. I’m also waiting for all the comments to be published before doing a detailed analysis. So that’s two major projects in my hopper… please subscribe for always free if you haven’t already.