The Pulaski County Special School District should be held in contempt for disobeying a circuit judge's order to release documents he told them must be disclosed under the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act, said a lawyer for a Little Rock man who recently prevailed over the schools in an open-records lawsuit.
Circuit Judge Chip Welch ordered the district to turn over the records requested by Stephen Nicholas Delaney for free and in an electronic format the way he had requested. The schools had tried to charge him $272 for paper copies, so he sued under the Freedom of Information Act.
Welch also suggested the page-rate the district charged Delaney for paper copies was questionable, but did not rule on the issue of whether that price violates open-records laws since he had ordered the documents be turned over for free.
"This Court observes that ... defendant's 15-cent charge per page appears to be unsupported and unreasonable under the circumstances," Welch's order states.
Delaney's attorney Matt Campbell reported the district's records show its copying costs are actually one-third of a cent per page for black-and-white copies and 4 cents for color.
The district is appealing the Sept. 17 ruling, but Campbell has since filed the contempt petition.
School lawyers responded Thursday by reporting to the judge that they turned over the materials as they were supposed to. One file was accidentally omitted but was provided as soon as the oversight was discovered, attorney Cody Kees stated in his response to the allegation, filed on Thursday.
"By plaintiff's own admission, when he was provided the documents on August 30, 2018, it took him 11 days to discover that one of the nine numbered PDF files was inadvertently not transmitted in the multiple emails transmitting the [requested documents]," Kees wrote. "This was corrected the same day the mistake was brought to the District's attention."
Addressing Campbell's complaint about redactions in the 1,800 pages of documents, Kees stated that the school district was still legally obligated to redact personnel information that was included in the document disclosure. When Campbell contacted the district to question the redactions, the district's lawyers reviewed his claims and got him a new and corrected set of documents within three business days, Kees said.
The district's lawyers dispute any deliberate wrongdoing and contend the contempt accusation is just a way for Campbell to run up the cost of the six-month-old litigation, the most recent round of court filings show.
For winning the lawsuit, Campbell, who operates the Blue Hog blog, has been ruled eligible by the judge to have the school district reimburse his costs and expenses, which he reports are $9,610.
Delaney had asked for five years' worth of records to show school payments to five law firms, Allen P. Roberts, Mitchell Selig Gates, Fuqua Campbell, John Walker PA and Bequette & Billingsley. He had also asked for seven years' worth of financial documents related to Mills High School and Robinson Middle School, plus three months of financial reports that had been submitted to the school board last year.
Metro on 10/01/2018