Oklahoma newspaper editor barred from City Hall
By The Associated Press
08.14.02
ELDORADO, Okla. — A local newspaper editor says city leaders are conspiring to hide public information by barring her from City Hall and charging her excessively for documents.
"They don't like me asking questions around there and reporting to the people," said Darlene Leese, editor of the weekly Eldorado Courier in far southwestern Oklahoma. "I just want them to abide by the law on open records."
Trustees voted April 4 to ban Leese from City Hall, and the town attorney has required her to pay excessive copying fees for public documents, The Daily Oklahoman reported yesterday.
Mayor Margrett Bryer called Leese a "trouble maker." Bryer said she has tried to lift the City Hall ban on Leese, but is unable to secure enough votes.
"I have bent over backwards to try to appease her, but there is no pleasing that woman," Bryer said. "She thinks there is something going on, and she's determined to find it. But if there were anything going on, I wouldn't be a part of it, that's for sure.
"I think a lot of people are just real upset with her."
Leese said the battle started when she requested the application of Town Clerk Rhonda Stevens — a request the editor claims was never fulfilled.
Soon afterward, the council banned her from City Hall for "abusive language."
Eldorado Town Attorney Charles Horton said Leese was barred for "repeatedly being rude and using threatening language to the employees." He said she constantly told the city's two clerks that they were violating the law and would be thrown in jail.
"She's just a bully," he said yesterday.
But Mark Thomas, executive director of the Oklahoma Press Association, said Horton overstepped his legal authority in dealing with Leese's requests through the open-records law. Horton told Leese she must pay a clerk's hourly wages for a search of documents as well as the standard copy charge of 25 cents per page, Thomas said.
The Oklahoma Open Records Act says fees "shall not be used for the purpose of discouraging requests for information."
Thomas said he told Horton he was violating the law, but that Horton wrote him back and said "he didn't read the law that way."
Horton said it took the city's clerks two full days to fill Leese's first request.
"They couldn't do anything but that, and that totally disrupted the public body's work," he said. "The first few demands that she made were just totally excessive."
The town attorney said he was following the law, which allows the city to charge the cost of producing the documents when it is causing "excessive disruption of the public body's essential functions."
Thomas said the district attorney should get involved to settle the case.
"I have never heard of a news reporter being banned from a city hall," he said. "Never. Ever. … But these people are down in their own part of the world and figure they can make their own laws.
"They had better settle this situation before a civil rights attorney gets involved to make a small name for himself. This could get ugly."