Dear Laws,
The fuss over more than 24,000 printed pages of Palin administration emails recently released under your authority seems to be dwindling. Since the release and the brief, mad scramble to make sense of what those boxes held, the Internet's search for meaning eventually led to a widespread conclusion that the email dump contained nothing of much significance.
And maybe that's true. We The Concerned haven't finished reading yet; we're only about halfway through (page 10,904 in fact). We started by reading the "redactions and withholdings" log first, so we started reading actual correspondence at least 189 pages later than most other people seemed to. Plus, we read very slowly and deliberately, and only during commercial breaks.
At first we were concerned because so many people (politicos, pundits and citizens alike) thought that the results would be different, that somehow anything salacious (or heck, even interesting) would emerge. But it seems none of them knew how you work. You might know this already, but you have some problems.
Maybe you didn't hear, but the first requests for emails were made to the Palin administration itself, which told people that each requested collection of emails would cost either the requesters or the state $15 million (an apparently common cost for records releases back then). Then complaints were made, and the fee was brought to a much more reasonable level. Which is good because the people of Alaska didn't get any where near $15 million worth of work out of its government in this case. What's more, there were so many individual requests filed regarding emails that the state just decided to put them all into one big, general one-size-fits-all request, which then took nearly 3 years to fulfill. During that time, various Attorneys General granted 16 delays.
Now that the whole sordid mess is over, we got really worried that you don't actually work as well as everyone thinks. As we've been hearing, dissatisfaction with the way you work is not limited to Palin-era emails. To the most concerned among The Concerned, the Palin email debacle revealed that you don't actually exist.
We double-checked, and indeed, it appears you are codified in Alaska Statute. Since that's the case, we're terrified that unless something is done to address your failings, the Palin email saga has given an excellent blueprint for anyone in government who feels the need to ignore, obstruct or circumvent you in the future. You're apparently so full of holes and conflicts of interest that anyone who wants to can complicate or confound the public's right to know about its government.
According to Anchorage attorney John McKay, who literally wrote the textbook on you, fulfilling a request is the responsibility of the affected agency, and there's no independent state agency designated to enforce you or ensure the public's right of access to records. There isn't even a penalty for non-compliance, except what might result from exceptional cases that result in court action. But if the courts are involved, the matter's almost surely costing everyone lots of money.
We know we're not the first to say any of this, but maybe we're the first to write you directly. It's troubling to put the very people who may be the subject of a records inquiry in charge of their own inquiries. It does nothing for public confidence in government, it potentially puts state workers in a tricky spot and it encourages agencies to downplay the public's right to know.
We have our doubts, but we're inclined to believe the state when it says that the 2008 flood of Palin email requests was so large that it caught everyone flat-footed. After all, even in 2008, lots of Alaska's public and private business was accomplished by postal service and fax machine. Heck, recently a review concluded that even Alaska's oil tax auditing system is in need of a serious overhaul. If the state can't bring auditing of its lifeblood into the 21st century, there seems little reason to hope the public records process will get there any time soon.
Technology and work habits these days have made the border between public and private lives very fuzzy lately, and professionalism is sort of getting lost between the cracks in many sectors. We The Concerned can relate. We have a million email addresses, some of which are private, some work-related, and all full of cross-pollination and "historic LOLs." We imagine it's the same with public employees, especially elected ones, and it seems a lot to ask to immediately switch everything over to public accounts at once. But no one ever said serving in government wasn't a lot to ask, and no one ever said professional life wasn't full of self-monitoring.
We The Concerned have worried for a long time that contributing documents to posterity and future historians just doesn't seem as important as it once did to elected officials. Maybe that's a symptom of our age more than the nature of politics, but none of that is an excuse for how ineffective you appear. The lessons to whatever future Alaska officials might seek to conceal high-profile things from the public and from the historical record seem obvious to us.
Some Palin emails released over the years show keen awareness that your provisions meant at the very least that messages sent from and to public email accounts were open to scrutiny. Unfortunately, the extent of state business done by the Palin administration through private email accounts to circumvent you seems like it won't ever be known. So lesson number one: Create shell, private-looking email accounts, and stick to them like herring roe to kelp.
Lesson number two: Try to charge as much money as possible for the documents requested. Money, it turns out, is a great way to discourage repeated public inquiry. Number three: Combine specific but related requests into one big batch of stuff. That way, especially if the combined request is large, it will take weeks for even the most dedicated people to process. The least dedicated among them (i.e.: most of them) will just drop the issue after reaching a surface conclusion and move on to the next shiny thing. Combining filings also virtually ensures that even the most targeted requests for correspondence will look like so-called "fishing expeditions," and it will make government appeals for extra time appear more credible. Plus, a massive dump of non-keyword-searchable, physical documents will be way more likely to push potential appeals or challenges out near (or past) the deadline for dissatisfied requesters to file them.
As long as your provisions remain effectively a burden to individual administrative bodies of state departments, and as long as everybody but an internal representative of the public's right to know has a seat at the pre-release processing table, and as long as you go without independent enforcement and don't provide non-compliance sanctions except in the most extreme, expensive cases, these strategies will remain on the table.
In fact, we suspect these structural failures, not partisan animosity or dislike for Gov. Palin or Gov. Parnell, are to blame for the current allegations simmering around the Web. Some people are alleging that things could have been "planted" in the recent document dump; that two administrations conspired to thwart the requests of numerous citizens and news outlets; and that evidence of supposed illegal, immoral or fattening activities was suppressed. We're not willing to go that far, but we must admit that if you functioned better, there would be less question. Less now and in the future.
A solution seems tricky though. As much as we enjoy thinking about what fireworks might come out of one state department being in charge of records requests of another department (DNR and DoR, maybe?), we also think the timely and fair dissemination of public documents is important for Alaskans. Who knows, maybe the problem with you also exists in borough, city and municipal open-government laws as well. Governments do like to make government sausage in private, after all.
It's not like everyone is ignoring the potential policy problems you pose, though. This week we learned that -- without first looking incompetent or worse to the entire world -- the Fairbanks North Star Borough is commencing a review of its own open records policies as they relate to email. We know, shocking.