Spokane fails a basic public records test 24% of the time. An audit and new hire aims to improve

The city of Spokane is struggling to meet its obligations under the state Public Records Act, a tool meant to allow everyone, whether they’re reporters, lawyers, cranks or concerned citizens, to crack open Washington governments and understand how decisions get made.

The law requires cities, counties, public schools and every other kind of government in the state to retain documents including police reports, emails between legislators, and data-filled reports that inform policy decisions and make them available to anyone upon request. Those records can be used to fight court cases, uncover misconduct and much more, theoretically making the government more transparent and accountable to its citizens.

“The people of this state do not yield their sovereignty to the agencies that serve them,” states the voter -initiated ballot measure enacted in 1972. “The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know.”

The law also has created a significant administrative burden for governments, sometimes resulting in relatively poor performance. A recent report by Investigate West found deficiencies in the records request systems of many major cities . Of the 15 cities the news outlet tested across the Pacific Northwest, Spokane was the slowest, taking nearly six times as long in one instance and failing to fulfill a records request after at least seven months in another.

Between 2018 and 2022, Spokane took an average of 32.5 days to respond to a records request, compared to a statewide average of 19.6 days, according to data provided by governments over a certain size to the state Legislature.

“That’s actually not terrible,” said George Erb, secretary of the Washington Coalition for Open Government, a nonprofit that advocates for government transparency. “Spokane is definitely on the slow end of the scale.”

Erb noted that Spokane took longer to fulfill records requests in that time period than other agencies in the region, such as Spokane County, Spokane Public Schools and the Spokane Regional Health District, the latter of which “was probably inundated with records requests a couple of years ago,” Erb noted.

“Clearly there is room for the city to be better,” he added.

The city launched a performance audit of its records request system in June. Though still ongoing and final findings have not been released, an initial report to the City Council showed that the city failed to comply with state law nearly a quarter of the time.

That figure wasn’t because the city was breaking state law due to how long it took to complete records requests – there are no clear cut legal standards for how long a government in Washington can take to deliver all of the requested records, and instead the records law relies on a “reasonable time frame” standard that can be highly variable and can be open to government discretion unless a court weighs in.

There is, however, a clear provision in law requiring a government like Spokane to respond to a request for records within five business days, either by delivering the records or, in most cases, sending a form letter saying that more time is needed and providing an estimated date of completion.

For 24% of the city’s records requests, those form letters weren’t sent out in time.

“I find that unusual, because the five -day notice is one of the most clear -cut metrics there is and it’s troublesome that the city is admitting that they are struggling to meet even that,” Erb said. “It’s a bright line, and it seems like it would be easy to hit, so it sorta suggests that there might be issues going on with the city’s staffing and procedures,” he added.

But the city admitting it has work to do is exactly the point, said Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown.

“When I came on, I heard that our public records office was very thorough and conscientious, but also that with the volume of requests and the staffing level that there was an imbalance in being able to really get through all the requests,” Brown said in a Friday interview.

The number of records requests received by Spokane and other governments in Washington has steadily increased, jumping 17% on average between 2018 and 2022, a pace of growth likely depressed by the pandemic, when records requests temporarily dropped sharply, Erb noted. The city has seen a roughly 3% increase in records requests in just the last year, according to initial data from the city performance audit.

Amid cuts to other open positions as the city works to balance its budget, Brown shifted some of those salary savings in order to hire a fourth employee handling records for the city clerk’s office, up from three at the start of her term this past January.

“The office has been under our City Clerk Terri Pfister – she’s amazing, her work ethic is incredible, and she is renowned in city hall for being responsible and a hard worker,” Brown said. “But I could see … it was clear more resources needed to be put there.”

Brown’s office launched the performance audit in June to identify where the city was lagging, what caused those delays and, to a limited extent, what was being done differently by other cities that were performing better. That full report is expected to be finished sometime this fall, and while Brown has suggested a number of possible improvements – she made an offhand reference to the possibility of using AI in an interview with InvestigateWest, for instance – she said Friday that she hopes that report will make the path forward clearer.

Councilman Michael Cathcart recently suggested that the city could consider publicly publishing any records that were requested, cutting down on redundant records requests and potentially answering questions before a request needed to be submitted.

Brown argued this would be inappropriate for many records requests, which are frequently specific to a particular developer looking at property records, a lawyer fighting a speeding ticket or were otherwise not relevant to the public, but she added there may be some routinely requested records or categories of information where the idea could have merit.