The city of Poplar Bluff spent nearly $3.5 million over an approximately nine-month period from late 2014 and early 2015 on no bid contracts with a former tech provider, ISI.
The contracts were put in place by former city manager Heath Kaplan, who was fired in 2015.
The money spent on those projects paid for thousands of hours of labor that were never received by the city, more than $1 million in equipment that was never delivered to the city, over-priced equipment that was received and never used and equipment that was used but replaced only a short time later because of problems.
Some of you may be asking why we’re bringing up such an old topic that many people want to forget. It’s taken a long time, after all, for the city to move toward financial recovery and healing of divisions from that time.
But it’s an important example of the importance of public records and the free access of those records to the taxpayers.
It illustrates a point that is important as a new effort in the Missouri House seeks to strip the Sunshine Law of many of its powers.
Rep. Bruce DeGroot, R-Ellisville, has filed HB 2049, which would make many changes that strike at the heart of the Sunshine Law.
One of those changes would take away the power of the public to see “transitory records.” This new classification of document would not be required to be retained by a public body and it would leave it up to the governmental body whether or not the record was public.
We can bet that former city manager Kaplan would not have retained the “draft” documents for his IT projects, or considered them “public” if he knew the Daily American Republic would request them and splash their contents across our front pages, exposing the price hikes of his IT project.
These documents showed us, and the city’s taxpayers, costs for equipment that increased sharply from the first draft to the final bill. The city ultimately paid $630 each for 200 video phones to be used on 125 phone lines. The cost for the phones went up dramatically between the initial “draft” equipment proposals that were around $400 and the final bill just a couple of months later.
This was true for many of the items ultimately purchased by the city.
It was something we only learned about through Freedom of Information requests made on documents we would not have access to under HB 2049.
Another component of the proposed changes would allow a governmental body to wait until a document request is made to determine if that document is open or closed.
Rep. DeGroot would also freeze all public record requests at any time the government announces it was closing for a long period of time.
The bill also would narrow the definition of “public business” substantially, making some existing public meetings no longer public, including meetings of subcommittees, said Dennis Ellsworth, executive director, Missouri Sunshine Coalition.
It would close generally available inter- and intra-agency memos from public review. It would close home addresses for employees or applicants for appointments based on a broadly written excuse of “security or safety” purposes, thus masking whether persons being named to such posts even reside in the jurisdiction. It would claim email addresses of citizens in the jurisdiction are not public records, thus hiding how those email addresses are being used.
“Rep. DeGroot has gone on record to claim computers and the iCloud have made it “all but impossible” for state and local government employees to comply with the Sunshine Law,” Ellsworth said recently. “But anyone who understands how computers work realizes that accessing public records is so much simpler today when a computer search takes minutes versus a hand-search of boxes of records that could take days.”
We want to leave you with this final statement from Ellsworth, “Transparency in government never hurt anyone except those who like to govern in secrecy.”
We think that Poplar Bluff has felt the very true and very painful fact of this statement recently enough that we cannot support these changes. We hope our legislators also will show they value an open and transparent government and vote down these proposals.