Opinion ID: 3008282
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Remand Is Appropriate

Text: Although I cannot join the Court’s opinion, I join its judgment that remand is appropriate. I believe DPS’s and the trial court’s improper reliance on the “special circumstances” exception, and the possibility of harm to public officials, warrants a remand in the interests of justice. I also believe that DPS should have the opportunity to argue that a specific exception to disclosure made by the Homeland Security Act should apply. The Court relies on and builds upon the Attorney General’s “special circumstances” test, which the Attorney General has applied numerous times in various letter rulings, in support of its holding today. However, this test, and its rulings, do not apply to the information at issue here nor to the legal theory upon which the Court relies in withholding the information. The genesis of the test is a one-page letter ruling from 1974, that was later expanded in 1977. It was not a freestanding test to withhold information, but rather was used in determining whether information could be withheld as a “clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy,” a separate, statutory exception to disclosure of non-core public information in the Act. Tex. Att’y Gen. ORD-54 (1974); Tex. Att’y . Gen. ORD-169 (1977); see also Tex. Gov’t Code § 552.102 (providing an exception for regular “public” information for information in a personnel file, “the disclosure of which would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy”). In other words, the attorney general examined “special circumstances,” such as an employee’s specific history of being threatened, harassed, or stalked, to see if information in a state employee’s personnel file should not be disclosed under what is now section 552.102 of the PIA. Rather than protecting more information from disclosure, the “special circumstances” test, as initially articulated by the attorney general, actually required more information to be disclosed, because only if the “special circumstances” existed could an employee’s personnel information (including his or her home address, phone number, and other personal information) be withheld. Tex. Att’y Gen. ORD-54 (1974); Tex. Att’y Gen. ORD-169 (1977). In later attorney general opinions, though, the “special circumstances” test was not discussed in conjunction with section 552.102’s “clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy” in employees’ personnel files, but rather as a privacy exception or “other judicial decision” under section 552.101. See, e.g. , Tex. Att’y Gen. OR2004-10845. No party extensively discussed the evolution of this test in the attorney general’s office from 1977 until today. However, it appears that the attorney general’s basis for applying the “special circumstances” test to information not subject to disclosure was based on the application of the tort of public disclosure of private facts (discussed in Industrial Foundation and analyzed under the employment file exception, predecessor to section 552.102) as another “judicial decision” excluding information pursuant to section 552.101. It also appears that the Attorney General has determined that section 552.101 is “other law” for the purpose of deciding whether core public information can be withheld. I agree that the tort of public disclosure of private facts may be a “judicial decision,” as it was extant at the time the PIA was promulgated, that could be the basis of an exclusion from disclosure under section 552.101 and may also be “other law” by which core public information is “expressly confidential” under section 552.022. However, section 552.101, in and of itself , cannot be “other law” to withhold core public information. To enact such a rule would thwart the Legislature’s expressed intent that core public information is not subject to the Subchapter C exceptions, including section 552.101. This is further evidenced by the fact that the Legislature’s new “special circumstances” exception, which appears to be similar to the Attorney General’s so-called common law privacy “special circumstances” exception, is in Subchapter C, thus currently applying to “public information” but not core public information that must be disclosed pursuant to section 552.022. Therefore, the Attorney General’s “special circumstances” exception should not apply to the information here. The Attorney General’s “special circumstances” test cannot apply in this situation. However, because the use of the test as an independent basis for withholding information was reasonably well established in a number of attorney general letter rulings for a number of years, because DPS and the trial court erroneously relied upon the test, and because of the serious personal safety concerns at issue in this case, I would remand in the interest of justice to allow DPS to argue any and all exceptions that are based on “other law,” such as one based on Government Code section 418.176, the exception from the Homeland Security Act. See Tex. R. App. P. 60.3; Low v. Henry , 221 S.W.3d 609, 621 (Tex. 2007) (remanding “to allow the parties to present evidence responsive to [the Court’s] new guidelines”). On remand, the trial court should consider whether specific information in the vouchers raises serious security concerns and should be redacted. For example, in the sample submitted in camera to the Court, one cannot only identify at which specific hotels the Governor’s security detail stayed and, inferentially, whether they stayed in the same hotel as the Governor, but also when the members of the detail arrived and departed from the foreign country. Other information in the vouchers, such as total amounts spent for lodging or costs of meals, may not present the same security concerns. The trial court should carefully consider the varying levels of concern for the different types of information in the vouchers.