Survey: Iowa residents often denied access to public records

By The Associated Press

09.25.00

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DES MOINES, Iowa — Citizens seeking crime statistics, routine police reports, nursing home records and other public information about their government routinely are turned away by local officials, many of whom are unaware of the state's open-records law, an investigation by 13 Iowa newspapers has found.

Twelve daily newspapers and one weekly paper conducted the joint investigation in the spring.

Newspaper employees were sent to all 99 counties to request public documents, including government expense reports, property-tax information, police reports, and lists of who has permits to carry concealed guns.

The newspaper employees presented themselves as Iowa citizens, not as journalists, as a way to test how citizens are treated when they ask for information from their government.

Some of the government workers — clerks stationed at the front counters, county attorneys, sheriffs and others — were helpful. But many, especially in law enforcement, were evasive or even intimidating, the joint investigation found.

The Des Moines Sunday Register reported these findings (the percentages are based only on counties where newspaper employees were not identified as a member of the media):

58% of the sheriff departments denied access to information about people who have received permits to carry concealed weapons.

42% of police departments in the largest city in each county denied access to reports of the most recent incidents officers dealt with.

9% of city offices denied access to expense reports filed by the city manager, city administrator or public works director.

2% of county auditor offices refused to make available records detailing expenses filed by county supervisors.

2% of cities denied access to building permits.

All county treasurers provided information about the sheriffs' personal property-tax bills, the kind of record frequently requested by lawyers, abstractors and real estate agents.

A separate mail request sent to Iowa's school districts found that 80% of the districts ignored the letter asking for a copy of the superintendent's employment contract and summary information about the performance of the district's students on state achievement tests.

Iowa's open-records law allows citizens and the media to learn about government operations in many areas. They can look at inspection records on child-care centers and nursing homes. They can check for crime trends in their communities, look at how government officials are spending taxpayer money, check court dockets for upcoming trials, find out the immediate circumstances of a crime scene on a police report, compare the salary of their local school superintendent with that of similar-sized districts and look up average math scores for their local school district.

Iowa law states that citizens seeking such information need not identify themselves or describe how they will use the information. Even so, many local officials, including those who provided information, asked for the person's name and workplace, and wanted to know how the information would be used, the investigation said.

In many instances, the newspapers' investigation described government officials questioning the information-seeker and refusing to provide the material. In some instances, the person was intimidated or even tracked or threatened with arrest.

When Des Moines Register reporter John McCormick requested incident-report information from Indianola police Chief Steve Bonnett, the chief asked McCormick for his age, address, employer and reason for making the request.

He stopped his questioning, however, when McCormick started reading the section of Iowa law dealing with the release of police incident reports. "Leave now!" Bonnett told McCormick. As McCormick walked out the door, Bonnett whispered to an officer who then followed McCormick outside the building and around the city's town square, the Register reported.

Later, Bonnett said he stood by his actions. "You were secretive and refused to give me a name or company you were with," he said.

In Bremer County, Charlotte Eby, a reporter for the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier, was told she could not immediately see expense reports filed by the county supervisors because it would take time to compile them. The next morning, all three members of the county board of supervisors together made a phone call to her.

Supervisor Steven Reuter said an employee in the county's finance office informed him Eby wanted to examine the expense records. He told Eby he was "uncomfortable" making the records available without knowing how she would use the information. "It's sort of a matter of we'll cooperate with you if you cooperate with us," Reuter told Eby.

Reuter later acknowledged that asking Eby why she wanted to look at the records was inappropriate under the open-records law. "We just asked the question," said Reuter, a county supervisor for 16 years. "I was willing to give her the expense reports."

Government workers were very often polite and helpful in response to requests to see building permits and property-tax records — documents that are routinely requested by real estate professionals, lawyers and others in business. There were occasional problems in that area, too, however.

Nick Hytreck, a reporter for The Sioux City Journal, was told that building permits were not available at City Hall in Sac City because the records were kept in an employee's house. After Hytreck made his request, city officials moved the permits to City Hall.

In Decatur County, Des Moines Register reporter Thomas O'Donnell asked to see gun permits. Sheriff Hubert Muir threatened to arrest O'Donnell if he did not leave the courthouse. Muir also asked to see O'Donnell's driver's license, and the information on the license was later used to put out an advisory to other sheriffs that O'Donnell was requesting public records.

"I put out an advisory to see if anything like this had been done at any other sheriff's department, Muir said. "I've only been in office for two years, so I've never had anyone come in and ask to see my gun permits, and I was curious to see whether this was happening in other places."

When the Register's McCormick asked to inspect the gun permit records in the sheriff's department in Knoxville, Marion County sheriff's Deputy Bobbi Basset first said, "None of the sheriffs department records are public."

Upstairs, in the Marion County Courthouse, the county attorney said he would have to study the public-records law when Bassett's decision was appealed to him.

The newspapers' investigation shows that more training is needed for government employees to learn Iowa's open-records law, and county attorneys should enforce the law, said state Attorney General Tom Miller.

"Certainly, one would wish that it was all 100 percent," Miller said.

While Miller has the power to force government officials across the state to abide by the law, he said he has never charged an official with violating it. Disputes over access to information usually are resolved without legal action, he said.

Besides The Des Moines Register, these Iowa newspapers participated in the investigation: the Ames Daily Tribune, The (Burlington) Hawk Eye, The (Cedar Rapids) Gazette,The (Council Bluffs) Daily Nonpareil, the Dubuque Telegraph Herald,The (Fort Dodge) Messenger, the Mason City Globe-Gazette, the N'West Iowa Review of Sheldon, The Ottumwa Courier, the Quad-City Times of Davenport, The Sioux City Journal, and the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier.

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