A liberal blogger says Secretary of State Mark Martin won’t hand over documents in the format he wants, a violation of the state’s Freedom of Information Act. On Monday, he filed a lawsuit in Pulaski County Circuit Court, asking to receive the documents digitally.
Attorney Matt Campbell of Little Rock has been critical of Martin, a Republican from Prairie Grove, in Campbell’s Blue Hog Report, a blog described as “unabashedly progressive, populist, and liberal in our leanings,” according to its website.
Campbell had requested e-mails and attached files exchanged between staff attorneys and an outside law firm that was hired to help defend the secretary of state in two discrimination and wrongful termination lawsuits.
Martin’s spokesman Alex Reed said the office has handed over the requested documents. He said Monday afternoon that the office has not been served with the lawsuit and that he would not comment further until he had seen it.
Arkansas Code Annotated 25-19107(b) requires the court to hear and determine the case within seven days of its filing.
The suit, which has been assigned to Judge Tim Fox, states that on June 10, Campbell requested nine e-mail attachments sent between October 2012 and March. The lawsuit says Reed replied that some of the e-mail attachments were available digitally, but others had been printed out and then deleted.
Four attached documents, all in portable document format, or .PDF, were then e-mailed to Campbell, the lawsuit says. Reed then offered to give Campbell paper copies of the other five attachments, which were saved as .PDF or as Microsoft Word documents, which have a .doc or .docx file extension.
Campbell replied that he was entitled to receive the documents in digital form as he had requested, not in a paper copy.
Arkansas Code Annotated 25-19-109 states that the person holding a public record should agree to provide data in an electronic format, if it is not that way initially, when cost and time associated with doing it are minimal.
The lawsuit questions how Reed could offer to print off versions of the documents if digital copies no longer existed.
The suit says that there was no more communication from the secretary of state’s office until June 24, two weeks after the original request. On that date, Reed e-mailed Campbell to remind him to pick up the printed e-mail attachments.
When Campbell said the printed copies did not fulfill his request and he did not pick them up from the secretary of state’s office, the paper copies were mailed to his home.
Campbell says in the lawsuit that his initial request has not been fulfilled because he has not received five of the nine attachments in a digital form.
“I’m entitled to under the Freedom of Information Act,” Campbell said. “I guess maybe they weren’t expecting somebody would actually go ahead and [file a lawsuit.]”
In the lawsuit, Campbell also questions whether the secretary of state is complying with the state’s record-retention law, which states how long some state government entities have to keep records, such as e-mails and attached files. The Legislature, courts and governor are exempt, the suit says.
Arkansas Code Annotated 25-18-603 (2)(B)(i) says the exemption extends to elected constitutional officers and their staff.
The record-retention policy states that documents relating to litigation must be kept between three and five years, depending on their topic. All correspondence considered substantive is supposed to be kept for four years.
Reed said office policy is to delete e-mails after one month, the suit says.
“The e-mails they turned over to me dated back to over a year ago,” Campbell said. “It seems selective. If they are deleting anything, it seems arbitrary at best.”
Much of Campbell’s past criticism has been based on hundreds of pages of information requested of the secretary of state under Arkansas’ information law.
Campbell stopped blogging in May 2011 after the state Republican Party filed its own Freedom of Information Act request for documents about Campbell’s employment with the Arkansas Supreme Court, as well as his e-mail and telephone records. Party spokesmen said at the time that they were concerned Campbell was blogging on state time.
Campbell was a staff attorney with the Supreme Court until he left in May to open his own law firm in Little Rock. Campbell returned to blogging after he left the staff attorney job.
He said Monday that the past dispute has nothing to do with the lawsuit.
“Had they given me all the documents even a week ago, this wouldn’t be a problem,” Campbell said. “They’re acting like the request has been fulfilled when it hasn’t.”
Arkansas, Pages 7 on 07/02/2013