Location and Hours

Community Building
35 West Main, Suite 300
Spokane, Washington 99201
(509) 835-5211

The Center for Justice is open Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., except during the noon hour and on court holidays.

Mrs. Rodgers’s Neighborhood

Thirty months ago, Cherie Rodgers left Spokane City Hall as one of the most popular and longest-serving council members the city’s ever known. On June 9th she was back to talk about one of her enduring causes–open government.

After serving nine years and getting term-limited into a restless retirement, Cherie Rodgers has been telling anybody who asks how she enjoys the refuge of her Indian Trail home and the company of grandchildren. Except she always seems to find a way to tune in to Channel 5 on Monday night to watch the council do its work. And, yes, there’s that continuing River Park Square business, with her disclosing just last week that she met for several hours with federal investigators and two Assistant U.S. Attorneys to give evidence about the city’s signature civic scandal.

Still, not much brings her back down to the council’s chamber. Last night was an exception. When she learned the council would be holding a hearing to talk about its public records compliance compliance audit by the state auditor, she circled the date. After a short opening by Justin Flaa, a senior project coordinator for Washington State Auditor Brian Sonntag, there was Mrs. Rodgers. Speaking frankly.

“The Open Public Records Act was one of the pride and joys of my years in office,” she began, tracking the law through its creation as a citizen initiative in 1972. “The purpose was to make government at a state level, the county level, and the local level more accountable to the citizens.”

“One of the most valuable lessons I ever learned as a member of the Spokane City Council,” she continued, “is that every person who came into public office [and who] was always going to do right for the taxpayers, be the watchdog of government, spend the money in a good steward relationship with the community. And what happens is almost to a person they became protective of the institution of government.”

Rodgers commended the 2005 citizen initiative that drove the recent 17-month public record act compliance audit that Flaa worked on. But she also wanted to speak very directly to Spokane’s recent history as something of a serial offender in public records withholding. While the state auditor’s recent report on Spokane and 29 other state and local entities noted that Spokane had paid out a record $299,000 to settle a River Park Square public records case, Rodgers pointed out that the number was on the low side. The penalties and fees the city actually paid out in two other RPS public records judgments plus the later settlement was well over $400,000, she noted. The Center for Justice represented the journalist/plaintiffs in all three actions.

Rodgers even offered a new proposal, one that obviously flows from the numerous closed sessions the council accommodated in the run up to River Park Square and in wrestling with the aftermath.

“What I would like to see,” she said, “is the city council [audio] taping its executive sessions. I know that as a member of the city council for nine years, I didn’t miss any executive sessions. But it’s easy to get off track in those. And I don’t see any reason why we couldn’t voluntarily tape those sessions and get it to a judge to determine whether or not we’re violating laws.”

That at least brought a response from Council President Joe Shogan who noted that there is a proposal [endorsed by leaders from both parties and at least a half dozen state newspapers] pending in Olympia to require just that, the taping of executive sessions.

Other than Rodgers, the only member of the public to testify at the hearing was former north side city council candidate Donna McKereghan. One of the things McKereghan highlighted is something that other public records respondents have also noticed. While the Spokane city attorney’s office has drawn bitter criticism (and, of course, court sanctions) for its lax and, at times, defiant behavior on public records, City Clerk Terry Pfister and her staff are top-rate public servants. Consider that it is still the official policy of the city not to accept email public records requests. It turns out, the state auditor “caught” Pfister’s office breaking the policy and taking requests via email anyway. Donna McKereghan testified, last night, that in her experience, it happens all the time.

This led to perhaps the oddest conclusion in the state auditor’s recent report–knocking the city for its policy of not taking email requests, but applauding the city (the clerk’s office) for violating the policy and taking them anyway.

McKereghan also shared the debacle of her recent attempt to obtain city council emails over a thirty period surrounding the last city election. She says she was first told there were 35,000 emails, then 10,000 and then she finally received thousands of emails that were heavily blacked out (redacted) to remove exempt material. Moreover, McKereghan said, there were only 79 emails that were actually responsive to her request, given the time period she was interested in.

“So when we talk about how expensive all this stuff is, some of it is expensive through our own fault.”

After McKereghan testified, Shogan called on Pfister who reported that, in response to the auditor’s report (see the article “Glass Half Full”), the city was already taking several actions, among them:

*Hiring a new deputy city clerk to be “principally assigned to public records” compliance.

*Updating the City’s policy to better conform to the Attorney General’s model rules.

*Posting more public records directly on the city’s website.

*Working with the police department and municipal court on “coordination of public records requests and standardization of procedures.”

*Evaluating the use of emails as a way to receive public records requests.

It was unclear during the hearing whether Pfister and her assistant clerks are in trouble with anybody as a result of the evidence that they are taking email records requests while the city is still evaluating whether or not it’s a good idea. And, again for the record, Justin Flaa made clear that, from the state auditor’s perspective, it’s pretty much a winner for them.

Shogan asked Flaa if he was “pleased with these corrections and improvements we’ve made.”

Flaa demurred.

“I can’t fully evaluate them at this time,” he said. “It looks like you’re taking some good steps in the right direction.”

“There’s always a double-edged sword to anything,” Shogan said as he wrapped up the hearing. “And there’s a double-edged sword on open public records. The benefit is, as councilwoman Cherie Rodgers has so eloquently stated, is to keep the public informed of everything we do so that there are no closed door, behind the door, behind the scenes actions taken that don’t come under the glare and inspection of the public. The other side of this is this is a tremendously expensive process, it’s time consuming, it can be very extensive. Unlike what Donna McKereghan said, we can get requests, and we have, for every email that the council has had, on a subject, for the last ten years. And you can imagine the effort that is required to do that. And ladies and gentlemen you pay the cost because it comes out of the general fund.”

With that the council president motioned the hearing to an end and the auditors leaving the front row were replaced by city planners getting their powerpoint equipment ready for the ensuing land use hearing. By then, Cherie Rodgers had gone back to her seat in the back of the hall and comfortably looked on, her inch and a half pile of notes and documents still piled upon her lap. She did not seem eager to leave.

Posted June 9th