Source: http://elighthouse.isolon.org/3090-2
Timestamp: 2019-04-24 16:34:26+00:00

Document:
I am submitting a complaint to the Office of the Public Access Ombudsman regarding the Anne Arundel County Public Schools (AACPS) response to my August 28, 2017 Public Information Act request for the email correspondence of two commissioners on the Anne Arundel School Board Appointment Commission (SBAC) plus their official appointment documents to serve on the commission (for the complete correspondence regarding that request, see below).
Over the years, I have submitted Public Information Act requests for the email correspondence of AACPS staff and other public officials under AACPS’s jurisdiction, including the superintendent, deputy superintendent, and lower level staff responsible for grassroots and legislative lobbying and other political activities on behalf of AACPS. A clear pattern has emerged in the AACPS responses, including the most recent response that is the subject of this complaint. Responsive emails have been deleted or otherwise not made publicly available with AACPS having no procedures in place to detect and punish such behavior other than meaningless boilerplate—used for plausible deniability purposes—that such behavior violates the law. AACPS has even acted as if its staff have a fiduciary duty to their employer to protect politically sensitive information from public eyes.
AACPS’s Public Information Officer, with the Board of Education’s and superintendent’s tacit support, has in effect been taking on the role of a high-class messenger boy between email requester and email requestee. The requestees’ responses might violate the spirit or letter of Maryland’s Public Information Act, but that is no concern of his, and he will turn a blind eye to such behavior. Since no explanation for the missing emails will be sought from the requestee, the Public Information Officer couldn’t even find an excuse to exempt them if he wanted to.
For the politically non-controversial information that he does receive in response to my requests, he will then redact any remaining confidential information while charging exorbitant rates (the wages of someone who earns more than $150,000/year for this menial task). To the requester, he will then provide, if anything, nothing but the most general explanation of the specific legal exemptions he relied upon to make his redactions. No mention will be made of the strong likelihood that the key redactions occurred before the Public Information Officer received emails for redaction from the requestees. Incidentally, the most common redaction he makes concerns the email addresses the commissioners use for their official correspondence (e.g., see the Brandenburg and Jones emails attached above). He then provides no explanation why public officials’ official email addresses are exempt under the Public Information Act. Indeed, in the past, AACPS has not exempted such information.
This behavior, in my judgment, conflicts with both the spirit and letter of Maryland’s Public Information Act. No private vendor would ever expect a consumer to pay upfront for a product with key features that might be excluded without any notice to the consumer. For example, imagine selling a computer laptop where, after the customer paid, the vendor reserved the option to remove the processor, keyboard, screen, and memory device without any upfront notice to the customer or allowance for a refund after purchase. It is just such an interpretation of Maryland’s Public Information Act that is the primary reason that I have filed this complaint.
I believe it should be part of the due diligence of the AACPS Public Information Officer to query the two SBAC officials to find out 1) what private and AACPS email accounts they used for the official business of the SBAC (the previous chair of the school selection commission used four private email accounts for such official business; see correspondence here and recent testimony here), 2) what emails they chose to delete or otherwise not provide, and 3) what specific exemptions under the Public Information Act they used to exclude such emails. Note that I consider this a floor and not a ceiling in terms of reasonable due diligence to be responsive under Maryland’s Public Information Act.
Given AACPS’s track record of charging high fees for highly defective Public Information Act products and then not offering a refund (namely, in response to requests for politically sensitive email correspondence covered under the Public Information Act), I believed it eminently reasonable to ask for a representative instance of the requested product (in this case, the email correspondence of one rather than both of the commissioners) prior to paying for all instances of the requested product. That is why I requested that the cost of each commissioner’s email correspondence be costed out separately. Again, my major concern has not been the cost of the AACPS Public Information Act fees (which in this case appeared moderate) but the nonresponsive emails that they have previously purchased. After much effort, I was successful in getting my requested sample (see correspondence below and attachments to this email), which confirmed that the type of politically sensitive information that I sought would not be provided.
The specific type of email correspondence I have been most interested in concerns personal meetings by SBAC commissioners with individuals who have already filed applications with the SBAC for positions on the AACPS Board of Education. It is a widespread perception among sophisticated candidates for the Board of Education that they would be wise to arrange private personal meetings with the key commissioners if they want to get appointed. I chose the two of thirteen commissioners that I did because they are leaders of the two most influential factions on the SBAC. What may be most interesting about these meetings is not their contents but that they took place at all.
The public has no knowledge of these private meetings. They are not mentioned in the Maryland General Assembly’s enabling legislation setting up the SBAC (pp. 7-11), which requires two public hearings to interview the candidates. The public, including competing applicants, should be entitled to know of the existence of such meetings, and that principle of transparency was implicit in the law designating SBAC as a public body and making AACPS’s Public Information Officer responsible for complying with Public Information Act requests concerning that body.
School board appointment politics in Anne Arundel County have historically been among the dirtiest politics in Maryland, with “dirty” being used here to signify that the key decision-making processes have often been hidden from public view. The abuse of the Public Information Act should not be allowed to perpetuate such dirty politics. The public deserves to know the vital processes by which its school board representatives are selected. AACPS’s Board of Education manages more than 80,000 students, 10,000 employees, and a $1 billion-dollar budget—more than half of total county expenditures. Moreover, the education of our children should be viewed as priceless. If the Public Information Act cannot be used to track the behavior of both the AACPS and SBAC officials who control the selection process, then the process becomes a mockery of Maryland’s right-to-know laws because nothing is more central to those laws than transparency in how public officials manage elections.
It arguably would have been better for the General Assembly to ban the SBAC from making such ex parte communications with applicants just as the federal Hatch Act does in banning electioneering by federal, state, and local officials; Maryland’s various ethics commissions do in banning political activity using the prestige of government offices; and Maryland’s General Assembly does in banning political activity by the state and various local state boards of elections regarding declared candidates for public office. But it chose not to do so and instead made the SBAC a public body subject to the Public Information Act. Nor do the SBAC’s bylaws—anti-democratic as they are—address such politically sensitive matters. As an aside, the sensitivity of such communications is revealed in the fact that commissioners during their public Q&A with candidates not only don’t acknowledge such private meetings but often imply that no such meetings took place.
The third set of documents I requested in my August 28, 2017 Public Information Act request was for the appointment letters of the two commissioners to confirm the dates they were appointed to the commission. These dates were important because my request for their emails was to begin upon the date of their official appointment to the SBAC. AACPS’s Public Information Officer asserts that neither of the commissioners “have official letters of appointment to the Commission” (see September 8, 2017 email below). I subsequently repeatedly asked him for any other information that would point to their official appointment dates.
A little background might be helpful on the political sensitivity of appointment letters, which might not otherwise be apparent. Nearing the end of the term of the Anne Arundel school board selection commission appointed by Governor O’Malley, I repeatedly asked the chair of the commission over a period of months for a copy of his appointment letter, including the specific date on the letter, which would determine the date his chairmanship ended. The Chair repeatedly refused my request for that information but there was no question that an appointments letter did exist and marked the official appointment date. Prior to that, I asked the commission to publish appointment letters on its website, something both previous and current selection commission leaders have refused to do. This information turned out to be extremely politically sensitive during 2015 after a new governor was elected in November 2014. The reason was that the date on the appointment letter determined when the new governor could take control of the commission to fill some open seats. As it turned out, this transition to a new commission was so controversial that it resulted in two lawsuits, one by each of the two major factions on the SBNC, and a change by Maryland’s General Assembly in the school board selection law to create a mixed system of school board elections and appointments. Of course, in my Public Information Act request, I was not interested in seeing the appointment letters for such now irrelevant purposes. I was interested in them so I could precisely specify the dates that my Maryland Public Information Act would cover.
Pointing to appointment correspondence (see September 18, 2017 email below and accompanying attachments above), AACPS’s Public Information Officer proposed March 13, 2017 as the appointment date for Commissioner Jones and April 13, 2017 as the appointment date for Commissioner Kipke. I replied that I would accept these appointment dates for purposes of determining the beginning date for my Public Information Act request for their emails.
Despite my acceptance of those dates for purposes of fulfilling my Public Information Act request, they were clearly absurd. More important, the subsequent response to my Public Information Act request clearly didn’t provide emails that would have been responsive if those early dates had been used.
Consider the provided appointment email dated March 13, 2017 from Commissioner Jones to AACPS. The email is entitled “RE: Appointments to School Board Nominating Commission” and has the contents: “My assumption is that TAAAC will appoint me again.” That email’s proposed starting date, March 13, 2017, seemed absurd for several reasons. First, the letter concerned his appointment to the School Board Nominating Commission (SBNC), not the School Board Appointment Commission, of which the legislation creating it did not pass until April 2017. Second, if March 13, 2017 were the starting date, then Mr. Jones’s lobbying on the legislation creating the SBAC and his litigation against the SBNC in light of the SBAC would presumably have had to be included in the email correspondence. Third, his school board candidate recruitment activities, if any, would have had to be included. Similar absurdities occurred with the proposed April 13, 2017 date for Ms. Kipke, which was contained in an email from the SBNC’s former chair concerning reappointment to the SBNC, which was then still in existence. Using the March 13, 2017 starting date, there are many topics, in addition to meeting with announced SBAC candidates, that should have been but weren’t included in the email correspondence responsive to my August 28, 2017 Public Information Act request.
In any case, the emails provided in response to my Public Information Act request only ranged from July 13, 2017 (the date candidate applications were due) to August 29, 2017 (the day after my Public Information Act request). The first meeting of the SBAC, at which time all the commissioners clearly claimed to be appointed by sitting on the dais and voting, was June 6, 2017. The narrow range of the provided emails in itself makes a mockery of my request.
In conclusion, to the extent that AACPS’s Public Information Officer continues to act in this case as if he is little more than a postal service transferring messages to and from a Public Information Act requester and requestee, I don’t see much value in communicating directly with him (except for the requestees and senior AACPS staff who might highly appreciate a whipping boy), for he has effectively delegated the job of Public Information Act officer to the requestees. In such a case, where the requestee has effectively been designated a Public Information Officer, it would seem most efficient to bypass the nominal Public Information Officer and go directly to the real Public Information Act officers—the two commissioners whose emails were requested. What they should clearly answer is 1) what email addresses did they use for correspondence conducted under color of their official SBAC position, 2) what subset of their official correspondence did they claim was exempt from my Public Information Act request, and 3) what was the specific legal exemption they used to justify withholding that correspondence.
For background information on public access to public officials’ email, I recommend that you read a recent article published by ProPublica: Experts Say the Use of Private Email by Trump’s Voter Fraud Commission Isn’t Legal, September 15, 2017. A major difference between the scenario described in the ProPublica article and the one that I’ve described is that I’ve been raising these issues with AACPS officials for many years so that pleading ignorance about such shenanigans isn’t plausible.
Another recent article highlights the current clashing sensibilities within Maryland about deleting government emails: Anne Arundel judge orders investigation into three of Hillary Clinton’s attorneys, September 11, 2017. (More than a dozen media outlets covered this story, including the Washington Times (with 592 comments at last count), Baltimore Sun, Fox News, and American Bar Association Journal).
Obviously, the circumstances are different with these government email scenarios. For example, the federal government has infinitely better enforcement than Maryland of its rules regarding public access to official emails, including independent and meaningful enforcement by the FBI, inspectors general, and the courts, so any comparison with the Hillary Clinton email case is of limited relevance.
This communication is in response to your amended request under the Public Information Act, Annotated Code of Maryland, General Provisions Article (GP) § 4-101, et seq., seeking emails of School Board Appointment Commission member Bill Jones.
Documents responsive to your request are attached to this email. As allowable under the act, I have redacted non-public email addresses and other contact information contained in the attached documents.
For your record-keeping purposes, I spent one hour and 15 minutes examining and redacting, as appropriate, the emails attached to this correspondence. Combined with the one hour previously expended to compile the emails of Mr. Jones and of Susannah Kipke (the latter of whom you deleted from your request after such compilation of documents was complete), I have expended 2 hours and 15 minutes of labor on this request.
While the Act certainly allows me to require reimbursement for the 15 minutes over and above the two hours of labor allotted free under the Act, I have no desire to do so and do not believe, in fact, that doing so would be in the spirit of the Act. However, please be advised that your changes of course during the processing of this request have resulted, as described above, in the two hours of labor allotted free under the Act now being expended. A further request related to this matter would require reimbursement from you for any time expended in the processing of that related request.
In the event you disagree with any determination regarding this Maryland Public Information Act request, you have the right to seek review or remedy in accordance with the following statutory provisions: GP §4-1A-01 through §4-1A-10; GP §4-1B-01 through §4-1B-04; and GP §4-362.
In other words, no fulfillment of my request could be done without your having in your possession an official date that they were appointed to the SBAC. My request for the appointment letter, then, was merely to provide a check on your providing me with an arbitrary official appointment date.
“1) Mrs. Kipke spent 1.25 hours locating and transmitting emails to me in order to be examined.
A logical corollary of such claims is that you had information regarding the official appointment dates for Ms. Kipke and Mr. Jones.
In your September 14, 2017 reply to my September 8, 2017 email, you again ignored the substance of my information requests, including ignoring my question concerning how you would know the responsive date range for Ms. Kipke’s and Mr. Jones’s email correspondence. In response, on September 14, 2017 I replied that “your delaying and obfuscation tactics have exhausted me,” which presumably was your intent. Thus, lacking the necessary information on which to assess whether your intent was only to partially fulfill my request by sending me the junk emails provided to you and with no reasonable justification for redacting the remainder, in my September 17, 2017 reply to you I limited my request to just the email correspondence of Mr. Jones. But even that request was necessarily based on the time of official appointment to the SBAC.
In your September 18, 2017 response to me, you purport to provide the official appointment dates for Ms. Kipke and Mr. Jones. I will accept the dates on those emails as the official appointment dates for Ms. Kipke and Ms. Jones. For Mr. Jones, the March 3, 2017 date on his email to you would require that he include all email correspondence beginning March 3, 2017 concerning the SBAC, including TAAAC lobbying on the SBAC legislation. For Ms. Kipke, the April 13, 2017 date on Ms. Brandenburg’s email to you, labeled “County Executive Appointments to SBNC” would require that she include all email correspondence beginning April 13, 2017 concerning the SBAC, including the winding down of her SBNC litigation in light of the then newly passed legislation creating the SBAC.
In the emails concerning appointment of both Ms. Kipke and Mr. Jones, you redact their email addresses for SBAC related correspondence. You provide no justification for this redaction, and I am not aware of any exemption under the Maryland Public Information Act that allows Maryland public officials to redact the email addresses they use in their capacity as public officials. Please cite the specific exemption used to redact the private email addresses that SBAC officials use to conduct their official business.
To summarize, when you claimed that it would take 1.25 hours for you to process the emails provided to you by Ms. Kipke and 1.0 hours to process the emails provided to you by Mr. Jones, I trust that the period covered by those emails began on April 13, 2017 for Ms. Kipke and March 3, 2017 for Mr. Jones. If that is incorrect information, you should state the specific covered dates and the evidence those dates were chosen as opposed to the official appointment dates you claimed to have provided me on September 18, 2017.
I look forward to your response within the 30 days specified by law.
I see from your response below that you have reintroduced a portion of your original request which you appeared to have pulled out in your September 14, 2017, email to me. As I have said previously, this process has become unnecessarily complicated because you continue to change course. Nonetheless, please find attached emails from Mr. Jones and Amalie Brandenburg to me regarding SBAC appointments. Please note that my original email to agencies contained an error (it stated the County Executive had three appointments when, in fact, he has two). Subsequent to my discovery of that, I had a telephone conversation with Ms. Brandenburg and she conveyed to me that the County Executive’s appointments were herself and Ms. Kipke.
I have redacted, as allowable under the Act, personal or non-public email addresses and telephone numbers.
Be sure in your response to include the dates that both Mr. Jones and Ms. Kipke were officially appointed to the SBAC and how you were able to ascertain those dates given that both Mr. Jones and Ms. Kipke weren’t provided appointment letters. As you know, my Public Information Act request specifies a date range for email correspondence beginning with the date in 2017 that they were officially appointed to the SBAC.
In trying to decipher the myriad directions your multiple statements and accusations took, I overlooked the alteration of your original request. Please forgive me.
I am happy to examine Mr. Jones’ emails. However, please note that I have already expended one hour of work on the compilation of emails from Mr. Jones and Ms. Kipke. That work was done before you altered your request and, thus, cannot be changed now.
I will undertake the examination of Mr. Jones emails, but please be advised that, as previously stated, you would be responsible for reimbursing AACPS for any time expended beyond an additional hour at a rate of $78.10 per hour. My desire at this point is simply to bring a close to this all-too-lengthy and unnecessarily complicated request.
I will contact you once my examination of Mr. Jones’ emails is complete.
To repeat: I am asking for only one of the three sets of documents I originally requested. The quote you gave me was for two of the three sets of documents. The price should be adjusted based on the fact that I’m now requesting only one of those two sets.
This leaves aside the question of all the emails that Mr. Jones and Ms. Kipke have chosen not to provide me, with your tacit approval, and without citing any specific legal exemption under the Public Information Act for exempting them. Based on your correspondence, you apparently didn’t even ask them what email accounts they used to send and receive correspondence regarding the SBAC.
In the past, when I have requested politically sensitive emails from your office, you have turned a blind eye when such emails were deleted or otherwise not provided while charging me $78.10/hour for processing the remaining detritus that should have been processed using minimum or entry level wages. Nobody in the private sector would expect a consumer to purchase a product without providing any reasonable information about the nature of the product being purchased. But that is exactly what you are attempting to do. By starting with the Jones email correspondence, I can get a sense of the quality of the information you intend to provide me without your having to state that upfront, which you obviously are highly resistant to doing.
You would be responsible for reimbursing AACPS for two hours of labor. The hourly salary of the person who will perform this work is $78.10, and the reimbursement amount required from you would be $156.20. Should the actual time expended be more or less than the estimate, your amount of required reimbursement would be adjusted accordingly.
As provided in Administrative Regulation KI-RA, “Where the cost estimate is likely to be $50.00 or more, AACPS will require a deposit of 75 percent of the estimate before initiating any research, preparation, and compilation.” In this case, that amount is $117.15. Full payment would be required before any documents are delivered.
Once I receive the $117.15, I will commence the remainder of the work.
In your most recent response, you still did not break down the cost estimate in the format I have repeatedly requested of you. But I believe you’ve given me enough information for you to fulfill my request promptly. Specifically, I request the email correspondence of TAAAC Executive Director Bill Jones from the time he was appointed to the SBAC until the time this request is fulfilled. According to your calculations, the total time required if the email correspondence of both Mr. Jones and Ms. Kipke were provided is 4.25 hours, of which Ms. Kipke, the SBAC’s Chair, provided the lion’s share of email. Thus, based on those calculations, Mr. Jones’s correspondence should fall within the 2-hour limit.
As to my other questions, they remain unanswered. But I’ll grant that your delaying and obfuscation tactics have exhausted me.
Your request is being treated in the same manner as any other request received by this office.
I simply asked Ms. Kipke and Mr. Jones to locate and forward to me all emails regarding SBAC business that were in their possession at the time I requested them. Anne Arundel County Public Schools has neither jurisdiction nor power to order a search of any private devices. As staff for the School Board Appointment Commission, I believe it is our duty to take reasonable and prudent steps to acquire documents in response to a Public Information Act request. We have done that in this case.
In none of my multiple responses to this request have I claimed that anything is exempt from disclosure. I am not going to engage in a series of hypotheticals with you as to what may or may not be exempt with regard to what may or may not be contained in emails I may inspect.
As I have stated previously, under the provisions of the Act, the first two hours of labor would be provided free of charge with regard to your request. I have essentially provided you with 4.25 free hours (two of mine and 2.25 combined from Mrs. Kipke and Mr. Jones) of free labor in the researching and compiling of these documents.
So I reiterate that given the above, you would be responsible for reimbursing AACPS for two hours of labor. The hourly salary of the person who will perform this work is $78.10, and the reimbursement amount required from you would be $156.20. Should the actual time expended be more or less than the estimate, your amount of required reimbursement would be adjusted accordingly.
I will need written correspondence from you as to how you wish to proceed before doing any further work on your request. Please email me at rmosier@aacps.org.
I greatly appreciate your prompt reply. Unfortunately, you didn’t answer the three questions I asked, although I would agree that you partially answered question #1. In politics and PR, it is an endemic and unfortunate practice to avoid answering questions that one doesn’t want to answer not by refusing to answer the question but by responding at great length to a different question that many in the intended audience will take as actually answering the question. I hope that wasn’t your intent here.
#1. As for the labor breakdown request, I effectively requested that the sets of documents for Mr. Jones and Ms. Kipke be treated as separate Public Information Act requests. I further noted that “Since neither Susannah Kipke nor Bill Jones are AACPS employees, their time spent retrieving their official correspondence from their various computers and smartphones cannot be included within the 2-hour limit.” Your answer to my question effectively only restated and confirmed my qualifying phrase. Since the only additional time in processing the requests is presumably your time spent redacting them, please state the amount of your time you estimate will be spent redacting the sets of documents for Mr. Jones and Ms. Kipke respectively. As for the appointment letters for Mr. Jones and Ms. Kipke, they claim that no such letters exist. But I made clear that my primary interest in seeking those appointment letters was to find out the exact date they were appointed, which would determine the date range of my Public Information Act request. What was the specific date they were appointed? And, since there is apparently no official appointment letter, there is an obvious follow-up question: how would you even know such a date?
#2. You completely ignored my requests for “what steps, if any, AACPS took to be assured of receiving all the requested emails for official SBAC correspondence that Susannah Kipke and Bill Jones.” In the past, AACPS has taken no steps in this regard. I will assume that your non-answer is a confirmation that it continues to take no steps in this regard.
#3. You completely ignored my requests for “the types of email correspondence regarding the SBAC that you are claiming are exempt from public disclosure, including the specific legal exemption you are using to make this claim.” In the past, AACPS has been willing to send me junk emails while redacting with no explanation and at great expense to me (after all, the primary allowable cost of fulfilling these requests is your time spent redacting them), the parts that would be of public interest. To illustrate the importance of this question, let me provide a specific example of the type of material correspondence that Mr. Jones, Ms. Kipke, and you might choose to exclude without explanation. Both Mr. Jones and Ms. Kipke corresponded with and in some cases met with SBAC applicants (and also presumably corresponded about those meetings with their colleagues). Indeed, some of the more sophisticated applicants have considered private meetings with select SBAC commissioners (and, prior to that, the SBNC) to be far more helpful to their candidacies than their public applications and testimony. What assurances do you have, if any, that Mr. Jones and Ms. Kipke didn’t exclude such correspondence in the correspondence they forwarded to you? And if they indeed forwarded at least some of that correspondence to you, would you choose to include that correspondence in response to my Public Information Act request? If not, what legal exemption would you cite in excluding that information?
I’d recommend addressing any insinuation “that there is something untoward taking place” by answering the actual questions you have been asked. Your longtime tactic of non-answers and eloquent answers to questions that haven’t been answered hasn’t been conducive to building such trust.
This communication is a second follow-up to your request under the Public Information Act, Annotated Code of Maryland, General Provisions Article (GP) § 4-101, et seq., seeking information related to the School Board Appointment Commission of Anne Arundel County.
While I can find no legal requirement to break down a cost estimate to the level you desire, I will do so in the interest of transparency and of completing the fulfillment of this request as quickly as possible.
I will also, however, once again take issue with your insinuations that there is something untoward taking place with this request and that has taken place in the fulfillment of other requests. Those accusations are unfounded and untrue.
As it relates to Item 3, neither Mrs. Kipke nor Mr. Jones have official letters of appointment to the Commission.
Mrs. Kipke spent 1.25 hours locating and transmitting emails to me in order to be examined.
Mr. Jones spent 1 hour locating and transmitting emails to me in order to be examined.
Please note that because Mrs. Kipke and Mr. Jones do not receive compensation for their membership on the Commission, I have not calculated a dollar figure (though I believe I certainly could have) for the time they expended.
Outside of their time, I have spent one hour compiling and appending the emails. As stated in my previous correspondence to you, I estimate that it will take three additional hours to examine and redact, as appropriate and allowable under the Act, the emails that exist.
Under the provisions of the Act, the first two hours of labor would be provided free of charge. I have essentially provided you with 4.25 free hours (two of mine and 2.25 combined from Mrs. Kipke and Mr. Jones) of free labor in the researching and compiling of these documents.
So I reiterate, given the above, you would be responsible for reimbursing AACPS for two hours of labor. The hourly salary of the person who will perform this work is $78.10, and the reimbursement amount required from you would be $156.20. Should the actual time expended be more or less than the estimate, your amount of required reimbursement would be adjusted accordingly.
In my August 28, 2017 Public Information Act request, I specifically asked that the cost be broken down into three time components if the total sum of hours would be more than two hours. Please provide separate time requests for the 1), 2), and 3) sets of requested documents.
Please explain what steps, if any, AACPS took to be assured of receiving all the requested emails for official SBAC correspondence that Susannah Kipke and Bill Jones sent via their private email systems. In the past, AACPS has turned a blind eye when recipients didn’t comply with Public Information Act requests for responsive emails either by not forwarding them to your office (if on private or government email systems) or deleting them (if on government email systems).
Please also specify the types of email correspondence regarding the SBAC that you are claiming are exempt from public disclosure, including the specific legal exemption you are using to make this claim. In the past, the most important types of official correspondence have been subject to arbitrary withholdings without either a public acknowledgment or specific legal justification for the withholding.
This communication is a follow-up to your request under the Public Information Act, Annotated Code of Maryland, General Provisions Article (GP) § 4-101, et seq., seeking information related to the School Board Appointment Commission of Anne Arundel County.
A sufficient number of emails that fall within the scope of your request exist such that it will take more than the two hours of labor allotted free under the Act to examine and appropriately redact documents should that be necessary.
It has taken approximately one hour to compile the documents that exist and are responsive to your request. AACPS believes it will take approximately three additional hours to examine these documents and make any appropriate redactions as allowable under the Act. Given the above, you would be responsible for reimbursing AACPS for two hours of labor. The hourly salary of the person who will perform this work is 78.10, and the reimbursement amount required from you would be $156.20.
As provided in Administrative Regulation KI-RA, “Where the cost estimate is likely to be $50.00 or more, AACPS will require a deposit of 75 percent of the estimate before initiating any research, preparation, and compilation.” In this case, that amount is be $117.15.
This communication is in response to your request under the Public Information Act, Annotated Code of Maryland, General Provisions Article (GP) § 4-101, et seq., seeking information related to the School Board Appointment Commission of Anne Arundel County.
This request has been forwarded as appropriate, and pursuant to the Maryland Public Information Act, we will provide that information which is public within 30 days of your request, and certainly sooner if it is readily available. Please note that the Act does not require an agency to create new documents to satisfy a request.
Under the Maryland Public Information Act, State Government Article (SG) §§ 10-611, et seq., I request the following documents: All emails of School Board Appointment Commission of Anne Arundel County (SBAC) commissioners: 1) Susannah Kipke, and 2) Bill Jones covering the period from the time of their appointment to the SBAC (the SBAC first met on June 6, 2017, but its commissioners were appointed before then) to when this Public Information Act is fulfilled. Attachments are included in the definition of “email.” The emails should include all emails concerning the SBAC’s official business regardless of whether an AACPS email address was used in that correspondence. For example, the longtime chair of the School Board Nominating Commission (SBNC), Joshua Greene, used four different private email addresses, including various personal and business email addresses, to conduct the SBNC’s business in addition to any email addresses provided by AACPS. As you know, Maryland’s Attorney General has ruled that the Public Information Act is concerned with whether an email pertains to official business, not whether it was sent or received via a government email address. Please note that emails to and from or on behalf of candidates who submitted applications to the SBNC are covered under the Public Information Act.
I also request: 3) the official letters that appointed Susannah Kipke and Bill Jones to the SBAC. Please note that in the Public Information Act request above I was not able to specify the appointment dates because that information was not published on the SBAC website. Alternatively, you may satisfy this part of my request by publishing the commissioners’ appointment dates on the SBAC website. As you may recall, under the SBNC the apparently innocuous question of appointment dates became a highly politically charged question, with the chair refusing to provide that information publicly.
I request that all the information be emailed to me in an electronic format (i.e., no paper copies). I also request that where an electronic document exists in a machine-readable format such as an Outlook email or Microsoft Excel or Word attachment, it be provided in that format rather than scanned in an unsearchable format such as a pdf.
If fulfilling this Public Information Act request is expected to take more than 2 hours, then document requests 1), 2), and 3) above should be costed out separately in your response to me. In addition, in the unlikely event that any information cannot be provided to me in an electronic format, it should also be costed out separately. Since neither Susannah Kipke nor Bill Jones are AACPS employees, their time spent retrieving their official correspondence from their various computers and smartphones cannot be included within the 2-hour limit. In any case, their forwarding their email to you should only take a few minutes, as forwarding a selected set of emails should require merely the push of a few buttons.
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