Free information can cost you

Public information is exactly that - public. That doesn’t mean you will get to see it.

Ask a public university about their number of sexual assault complaints. Or even their suspensions for students smoking pot. They won’t answer. The school may have no problem sharing its numbers with you, but first the school would have to hand the numbers over. You will find this is not an easy task.

The HSU Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Project, consisting of eight students, a recent journalism alumni and supervised by professor Marcy Burstiner, took part in a nation-wide open records audit of public and private universities over the course of the Spring semester.

The Student Press Law Center, an advocate for First Amendment Rights, organized the project in celebration of Sunshine Week. Sunshine week is led by the American Society of Newspaper Editors to show the importance of open government and freedom of information nationwide. Students from HSU, the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee and the University of North Texas collaborated with The Student Press Law Center on the project.

The HSU FOIA project audited 34 universities in five states: California, Nevada, Arizona, Washington and Oregon. The audit surveyed compliance of public record laws by requesting the total number of student disciplinary complaints reported to each campus’ student disciplinary committee.

This included information such as the number of student punishments, suspensions and a breakdown of each case reviewed.

By asking all these universities for the same information, The HSU FOIA Project team discovered that the process of getting information differs from state to state, and from one campus to another - even with those that are part of the same university system. The audits revealed inconsistency in fees, policy and access to public information.

Student Press Law Center Executive Director Frank LoMonte said this is an example that shows there is a desperate need for state governments to require someone who knows the law to work in public information positions.

“There is a lot of inconsistency in decision making,” LoMonte said.
When requesting documents, you may be charged a copying fee, but the office you are gathering information from can waive it. The HSU FOIA project found that one inconsistency is the price some campuses try to charge to gather the information or to send electronic copies. To try to avoid copying fees we requested all of the information to be sent to us electronically.

Some schools requested 10 cents per electronic page, others requested up to $250 to hire lawyers to look for the information. LoMonte said, “It is effectively a denial.”

The University of Oregon wouldn’t give any of the information requested unless we paid them copying charges, lawyer fees, and staff fees that added up to $250.

“They can’t use the charge to keep people from getting documents,” said LoMonte. The charge is supposed to be based on a reasonable relation to the gathering and copying fee of the information.

When asked for a list of what information $250 would paid for, the university did not disclose anything and said they would not release any information until they were paid.

The California State University system had some inconsistencies of its own. Although the CSU system has a policy of charging 20 cents per page, one school waived the fee. Two others, including HSU, waived their fee after we inquired as to why they were charging 20 cents per electronic page.

LoMonte said the gathering of electric data should be less, unless the institution can show some proportion to cost. “It’s hard to prove it with electronic pages. [the cost of] 100 electronic pages should be equal to 20 photocopied pages,” he said.

The CSU system may have a policy, but the University of California (UC) system does not.
Requests were sent to seven of the schools. Four complied. Three did not charge us fees.
UC General Counsel Stella Ngai cited California Public Records Act Government Code 6253 which states, “…each state or local agency…shall make the records promptly available to any person upon payment of fees covering direct costs of duplication, or a statutory fee if applicable.”

Fees are not set within the UC system, she said. “Rates differ within the departments of schools because they need time to gather and produce information by copying and entering data,” said Ngai. There is no consistency in fees for the UC; that is left up to each school.

So within the same state and institutions, information has a different price. But confusion and delays are a part of the process too.

Colleges have different policies on which department will handle the records, and figuring out who to send your initial request to is part of the problem.

Lomonte said each school should have a specific person in charge of a FOIA request who is knowledgeable about the law and the procedure in fulfilling a request. That is not the case at every school.

Several times after we sent out our initial request we were informed that we sent it to the wrong person or the wrong office; when sending a FOIA request you want to send it to a public information officer first.

The problem with this is that each school has a different name for the position and the department. Titles ranged from “university communications associate director” to “public information specialist.”

Some of the schools forwarded our request to the correct person, others sent us contact information so that we would have to do it ourselves.

But the biggest inconsistencies were within the California State University system. Out of the twelve CSU campuses audited, only HSU, Fresno State and Northridge fully complied with the request.

A factor to consider in regards to schools that denied information requests is the enrollment of each campus.

This information is public and campuses with a high volume of students should have the information available, but that is not always the case. We found that some schools with large enrollment numbers have no records.

CSU Long Beach has more than 36,800 students, but Gene Wohlgezogen, from the Office of Information Security Management & Compliance, said in an e-mail they did not find any records that were responsive to the request. This campus has the second-highest enrollment out of the 23 CSU’s.

In Wohlgezogen’s response, he referred inquires to the Office of Judicial Affairs for an explanation, but our phone calls to that office remain unanswered.

Obtaining information is hard when files are missing. Four of the 34 campuses audited admitted they only kept partial records.

These problems are not unique to California. Out of five schools in Oregon, only one fulfilled the request. One other has partial records and could not comply, and the other three failed to fulfill our requests.

Access to “public information” is tedious and can be expensive, but what is there to do? LoMonte thinks the solution lies with the federal government. It should setup FOIA offices at the state level to process requests, he said.

“Right now it [has] 10,000 officers at 10,000 locations making individual judgment calls,” said LoMonte. “The average citizen is not going to have the time.”