Today's Seattle Times editorial on the verdict in the Yousoufian Public Disclosure Act suit:
We can only hope that last week's nearly $300,000 judgment against King County for years of flouting a legitimate public-records request will make an impression on public agencies.I think the most likely impression it will make is that the respective cost/benefit ratios for agencies and citizens are such that agencies will be emboldened to deny access whenever they prefer to cover something up.
One important recourse against agencies that flagrantly violate the Public Disclosure Act is to vote the bums out of office. The Seattle Times, for all its handwringing over this case should have come out much stronger against the one elected official who was responsible for this fiasco -- County Executive Ron Sims. Anybody who values open government should show Ron Sims the door this November and vote for David Irons.
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at August 31, 2005 10:29 AM | Email ThisCircle the wagons.
Posted by: scott158 on August 31, 2005 12:03 PMSpeculation only...
Do you think the dems in Seattle know they have a tough fight, so they are removing Irons signs? Just part of being fair. On the Eastside I see literally a 2-1 for Irons. Each Simms sign has an Irons sign on either side (with a respectible distance so as not to block anyone's sign)
Posted by: fred on August 31, 2005 12:46 PM...is breathtaking. As long as it involves some issue that they're interested in (see Part I, and Part II also), they trumpet "the public's right to know".
Refusal to release documents about the stadium? The public must know!
Refusal to release documents about a (male) police chief shooting his wife and himself?
The public must know!!
Refusal to release documents about how elections laws were broken in order to hand the governor's office to the losing candidate?
[...dead silence...]
#1.Sims' name was mentioned in the middle of the editorial, in the middle of a paragraph: "...a spokeswoman for King County Executive Ron Sims, Carolyn Duncan, ..." .
#2.Carolyn Duncan had been, until this past December or so, the spokesperson for DDES. I became familiar with Duncan in the course of the anti-CAO efforts, which legislation was put out by DDES. She replaced Elaine Kraft, who had been Sims' "spokesperson" since at least as far back as January, 2003, when Kraft made a similarly misleading, incorrect, and trivializing comment to the Seattle Times reporter who wrote a front page article about my case the day after the verdict in my favor from the Court of Appeals. At that time she claimed Sims had instituted improvements in PDA responses since he'd taken office, which would have been January, 1997. That was flat out untrue. It's in the court record in my case that they decided they would start, for the first time ever in County history, PDA training as a result of my lawsuit. In 16 hours of depositions we took of 4 county employees in 2001, we learned their PDA manuals had last been updated in 1992. This proved Kraft's comments could not possibly have been true. KC even had asked the judge in their "pleadings" (i.e. legal papers, or briefs) to go easy on them in part because they said they'd learned their lesson and would start a training program to cure their incompetence on PDA responses and to be sure they made proper responses to future requests. This was all cited by the judge in her 31 page opinion, which is at my website: www.ArmenYousoufian.com along with a link to the article in the Times from January, 2003. The judge did go easy on them, and made a comment that between the fines she did award, and the fact that they'd start training, that hopefully that would solve the issue for the future. You don't have to take my word for any of this, you can read the opinion and see where Judge Learned quotes the county's affidavits, etc., saying they'd turned over a new leaf, in effect.
Well, it's been 4 years since they started the training and made their promises to the judge and where are we at? Just ask Stefan...
Posted by: Armen Yousoufian on August 31, 2005 04:00 PM