The attorney and blogger behind the "Blue Hog Report" on Thursday filed an open-records complaint against the city of Little Rock in Pulaski County Circuit Court.
Matthew Campbell submitted three Arkansas Freedom of Information Act requests to the city between Sept. 8 and Sept. 16 that have not been fulfilled, according to the complaint.
Campbell wrote that he did not receive public records in response to the following requests:
• A Sept. 8 request submitted to the city via email that asked for "All monthly cell phone statements for any phone used by [Mayor] Frank Scott Jr. from 1/1/2019 to present."
• A Sept. 9 request, also submitted via email to the city, that asked for "'All emails received or sent by lrsmallbusiness@littlerock.gov."
• A Sept. 16 request made via Twitter to @CityLittleRock (the city's official account) and @kendrakpruitt (the account used by Kendra Pruitt, Scott's chief of staff) that asked for "'all applications, licenses, permits, agreements, communications (emails, text, etc.), and any other written records related to' the Food Truck Friday event at City Hall on September 16, 2022."
The city's FOIA division acknowledged the first two requests, but the requested records were never provided to Campbell, he wrote in the complaint.
[FILING: Read Campbell's open-records complaint » arkansasonline.com/924bluehog/]
At one point, according to the complaint, Little Rock City Attorney Tom Carpenter replied to a Sept. 21 email from Campbell tied to the business-email inquiry by writing the defendant, "I need an answer to Mr. Campbell's inquiry. Why have these records not been sent? It would seem relatively simple to copy the emails to the stated email address and forward the information."
No records were provided to Campbell following the third request sent via Twitter, he wrote.
Pruitt and the city did not contact him with regard to the request "to ask for an extension of time, to explain why the records had not been produced, or for any other purpose," Campbell wrote.
He added, "To the extent that Ms. Pruitt or the [city] may believe that this was not a valid AFOIA request because it came via Twitter, they are incredibly mistaken, and their failure to provide the records as request[ed] cannot be excused simply because the request was made via Twitter rather than by email."
Little Rock city officials did not immediately respond Friday to an email that asked for comment on Campbell's complaint.
The complaint was first reported by Max Brantley of the Arkansas Times.
"Frank Scott & Kendra Pruitt apparently thought I'd just go away if they ignored requests & refused to produce records," Campbell wrote in a Twitter post on Thursday. "Now they get to pay me for the privilege of showing the entire city how little they believe in transparency. Good times!"
Scott announced a retooling of the city's FOIA procedures in August while acknowledging he had been "displeased" by delays affecting the release of information.