As you may know, I am always wading through publicly accessible information looking for post topics as well as to better understand what’s going on behind the veil of silence promoted by the collusion of city councils and local media outlets. Many times, because information is not readily available on the Internet, I have to request specific pieces of data from city staff members and hope that I get it in time to write my posts. Unfortunately, in many instances, I run into unnecessary delays in procuring this information.
According to this article over at the Pioneer Press, Farmington School Board member Tim Burke attempted to ensure that data is released to the public in a timely fashion. This was in direct response to ISD 192 taxpayers having to foot an $8,000 legal bill because the school board and superintendent did not want the public to have full access to Brad Meeks’ complete contract even though it was mandated to release it per state law. The school board shot down the proposal (4-1 with Burke the only dissenter) to respond within two days and complete the request within fifteen. Instead they decided on a much more “open” policy which staff will try to respond to data requests within two days and will try to complete it within five or will at least give an estimate of how long it should take or why it cannot be completed. While this is an unfortunate outcome, it’s much better than no policy at all.
Let’s take for example my request for information on the Burnsville PAC VenuWorks Profit/Loss summary which, as defined by the Burnsville/VenuWorks contract, is to be delivered by the 20th of each month and is to include data about the previous month. I don’t have to do anything special to get this information except e-mail the city and ask them to provide it. Unfortunately, each and every single time I do I run into some excuse as to why the information cannot be provided soon after the 20th.
The first excuse was that the Finance Department and many other members of the city staff were busy working to meet the ridiculous and one-sided demands of Mayor Elizabeth Kautz and her insatiable need to support her Heart of the City project. At the time this seemed to be a completely valid reason as it’s not the staff’s fault that Kautz and Krew had them scrambling around trying to close holes on one side of the equation while creating new ones on the other.
The second, and most recent, excuse as to why I could not get a copy of the VenuWorks data is because the Finance Department is currently under their yearly external audit. I requested the information on Friday April 24th (4 days after the document was to have arrived at Burnsville City Hall) and was told that it wasn’t yet available. Because I am not a Burnsville taxpayer I really don’t push my luck too much there but if I was I wouldn’t be taking their excuses twice in a row. If the data was delivered on 4/20, I expect that a simple two page document should be available by 4/21 and especially by 4/24, nevermind a full eight days later. Burnsville city staff has admitted that this data is not compiled or edited by city staff and that they are just releasing what is given to them.
Now, normally you’d say, well, it’s extenuating circumstances in these two instances and we should let it go but then you need to go back and look at the local media/city council collusion that seems to be taking place between Thisweek’s John Gessner and the Burnsville City Council. A Burnsville reader let me know yesterday that they contacted their block captain and asked for the original e-mail. The reader found out that the e-mail was sent just after 1 PM on 4/21, the same day that Gessner wrote and published this article at 7:13 PM. If Burnsville can get a press release out to the public and get Thisweek to publish a scare-tactic article on the same topic only hours later (including the time it took Gessner to contact the Burnsville PD for a quote) then there is something truly fishy going on when the public cannot get a monthly, already compiled, two page summary delivered in less than eight days.
Now, while I shouldn’t be biting the hands that feed me, I feel that it’s important to bring these issues to light for the rest of the interested public. I should also mention that while I wasn’t particularly pleased with Apple Valley’s original data release practices, I have to admit that I have found them to be exceptionally responsive and open to sending documents in PDF per my request.
That all said, I wonder what you think about the reluctance of staff (as mandated by school boards and city councils) to release pertinent information to the waiting public. Should Burnsville taxpayers be upset that the city is hanging on to two page documents for more than a week because they are just too busy to e-mail a PDF while they seem to be pushing unimportant topics to the media in short order? Should Farmington be pushed to release information in a more timely manner while being held to a strict set of guidelines? Whatever you think, go ahead and comment on, this is an important topic for all South Metro residents and I’d love to hear what you have to say!
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April 28th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
I wonder if they are putting you off for some real reason, or if they just know the numbers are incredibly horrible. I would be interested to know if you requested something else how long it takes for them to get it to you. Try to request a copy of the safety press release and see how long that takes.
April 28th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
Chad,
I suppose that they know that the numbers continue to slide and that they realize where the data they provide to me ends up. It’s no secret that the PAC is a bigger failure than they anticipated which makes me wonder why they would even bother to hold it back at this point.
I suppose they really could be very busy over there with the audit and Kautz’ bullshit before that but it has to be concerning to Burnsville residents when a simple two page document can’t make its way around the office to those that can get it out the door as soon as it comes in.
I have to suggest to Burnsville that if the Finance Dept really is that swamped that perhaps information that is routinely requested by the public be rerouted from their department to another so that it can be handled in a more timely manner.
April 28th, 2009 at 3:11 pm
If you were having issues w/the website today, sorry about that. I think I have it fixed now. Please e-mail me if you notice anything funky going on from here out. Thanks :-)
April 28th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Busy or not, don’t data practices/open government laws require information to be given within a certain amount of time when requested? Extenuating circumstances such as the Audit are not valid excuses for delaying the fulfillment of the request.
April 28th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
In general, the type of people attracted to working within government, or to be elected officials, are exactly the type of people that do not feel any specific motivation to provide anything to the public in general. I know that’s a generalization, but it often is proven out. Especially at the local level, say city or school district.
An aside to that. I sent an e-mail to a contact listed in charge of the construction on CoRd 70 and 35W (the bridge) back in March when I was getting tired of driving through a big pot hole that was getting worse at the top of the southbound 35W exit ramp. Two days after sending the e-mail I had a response that said thank you for bringing it to their attention. The next day the pot hole was fixed.
With that sucess I sent an e-mail listed in charge of County Roads with questions about some odd Speed Limit signage on CoRd 70 down by Cedar. Two days later I got a response that the issue was being forwarded to the person in charge of signage on the roads. 2 days after that, a speed limit sigh was changed.
Now while I’m not a fan of how the County necessarily spends my money on “open space”. I must say, I felt like the roadway departments were surprisingly responsive. Apparently those folks know what their job is and take it seriously.
April 28th, 2009 at 7:47 pm
Mikeh, I’m sorry, but your statement about people who work in government is bullshit. Show me one government employee who fits that description, and I’ll show you three in the private sector that do too. I have a number of friends and family who work and have worked for the government, in positions ranging from working as a tourist information assistant, to legal counsel, to dodging bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they’ve all been as or more hardworking than anyone I’ve met in the private sector. You’re making a generalization about a few bad apples here.
April 28th, 2009 at 7:55 pm
Tim,
I left my job with the State in part because of “bad apples” (they are far more prevalent than you describe) and was utterly shocked by the number of hardworking and driven people I now work with in the private sector. So I suppose it depends on where you work and who you know but I do agree that Mikeh is at least partially incorrect in his statement.
My opinion is that people go to work for government with lofty goals and high hopes but quickly get bogged down by the quagmire of others who have been at it longer who are happy to get their step raises and COL increases without doing anything above the bare minimum. They know that they cannot be removed following their probationary period and are happy to make others wait because they are so terribly busy.
Mikeh is correct that government employees are slow to react and a pain in the ass to deal with (I provide my month-long ordeal procuring MDH restaurant health inspection reports as evidence) but it’s a learned trait (and not necessarily one they even know they possess) not one that they have to begin with.
April 28th, 2009 at 8:03 pm
Have you been to the eagan DMV lately? Ever tried to do anything at the Social Security Office in St. Paul? How about the Dakota County commissioners that would like to continue to hold workgroup meetings behind closed doors? The statement I made is a generalization.
All government workers are as hard working or more so than anyone in the private sector? Um, bullshit.
April 28th, 2009 at 9:04 pm
Mikeh, read what I wrote. I didn’t write that they all were that way; of course that’s not true. I wrote that the ones I’ve known were like that, and you yourself even noted that you had good experiences with the streets department when there were issues they needed to take care of.
Bill, maybe it is a matter of where one works, but I’ve worked in Fortune 500 companies ever since I graduated from college, and while I’ve always known hard workers at those companies, there were always plenty of people too who were content to do just the bare minimum they had to not to be fired. People who knew how to play the political games to get their way. People who used the corporate bureaucracy to hide their shortcomings, blame other departments, what have you.
There’s always going to be people like that — some wind up in the public sector, some in the private. So, maybe we’re going to have to agree to disagree based on our respective experiences.
April 28th, 2009 at 9:13 pm
Having worked for the government for most of my adult life, I’m quite offended. (or not at all) But, I think the problem is that the majority of government services are frequently working well below ideal staff conditions and are often the first called on the have their income lowered or the first to be forced to take unpaid “furloughs” from work, due to their status as paid-from-taxes employees. These things constantly happening or being threatened help keep morale low even in the happiest times. What Bill said about COL and step raises is very very true though.
I went to government work because I liked going to work every day knowing that my day would put a roof over a child’s head, or food in a child’s mouth, or take a child out of an unsafe place.
Also, it’s DVS not DMV. (My maiden initials were DMV, so the DVS change was quite welcome)
April 28th, 2009 at 9:30 pm
Tim, I’m good with that :-)
April 28th, 2009 at 9:31 pm
With regard to the Farmington School District’s new data practices procedure adopted by the board Monday night: I originally proposed a district policy, the school district equivalent of a law or ordinance. It set out time requirements for the district to respond to information requests, had requirements for notifying the board about data requests and would have required board approval to spend more than $300 on lawyers fees on data requests.
State law sets no time limits on how quickly requests must be answered. It calls for requests to be met in a “reasonable” period.
District staff objected to the strict requirements of the proposed policy and offered an alternative procedure–a guideline that doesn’t have the force of a policy, but still puts in writing timelines for answering data requests. It was amended during the meeting to include a $1000 expenditure in legal fees at which time the board must be notified (but not require board approval).
I voted against the procedure because I wanted something with the force of policy and to have that as an expression with which the board took the district’s data practices responsibilities.
The policy proposal was a product of my experience with the district in 2007 and 2008 obtaining data from the district. Most requests don’t get a involved as the one I started. Still, I didn’t want a repeat of that process again, even if it only came up once every several years.
In the end, the procedure approved by the boar is a good improvement over the what we had before, which was nothing. Just not all that I wanted.
April 29th, 2009 at 12:31 am
As a Burnsville resident and taxpayer, I’m very disappointed with the city’s inability to quickly respond to information requests, especially when it concerns the PAC. But here’s my biggest gripe. With the PAC having had what I would describe as a considerable amount of opposition to it being funded, built and operated as a public entity in the first place, you would think that the City of Burnsville would have anticipated a large number of requests for information regarding the PAC. You would think they would have prepared to be able to share or make this information available quickly and easily.
Secondly, as a citizen and taxpayer in Burnsville, I feel as though I’m a stock holder in the PAC. My money is being used to fund a publicly run business and if it does well and makes money, I benefit, but if it does poorly and loses money, I pay. That really isn’t much different than me buying stock in a publicly traded company except in that case, there are laws that govern what information must be disclosed, when and how often. The City of Burnsville should disclose financial information regarding the PAC to its citizens on a regular basis simply because we are the stakeholders in this endeavor.
Now if you go and look at the City of Burnsville’s website, you will find that they have a section called “E-Services” which contains an item called “Document Center”. This is an area on their website that is used to share certain documents (as determined by who I do not know) that are of frequent interest to the citizens and others. There is actually quite a bit of information available there including budgets, certified financial reports, Council meeting agendas and information packets that are prepared for the council members prior to their meetings and much more. So my point is this, we all want this information regarding the PAC and they know it, so why don’t they post all the information for the PAC in the Document Center, especially the financial information we are all interested in seeing.
So there you go, the City of Burnsville knows how to get out emails about pedestrian safety when the Mayor doesn’t get the traffic signal she wanted. The City of Burnsville owns John Gessner at This Week Newspapers and can get him to cooperate and write anything they want both online and in print. The City of Burnsville has an online Document Center for quick and easy sharing of information. There is only one reason for it being hard to get financial information regarding the PAC. They don’t want it getting out unless it is requested by someone, and then they will drag their feet. Lord knows they don’t want everyone to know that by the end of March the PAC was already coming dangerously close to its budgeted losses for the entire year of 2009.
So, does anybody think the next Burnsville worksession regarding the budget will include discussions about the PAC and how the city might have to deal with bigger losses than expected? How many more police and fire personnel will the City of Burnsville cut to cover the increased losses of the PAC? Does anybody think there’s an ice cubes chance in hell that Burnsville doesn’t increase taxes next year? And will Mayor Kautz tell us then that the increases were to cover the other budget issues and that “no new taxes were implemented to keep the PAC operating”?
I’m sorry, the whole PAC thing really gets my blood boiling!
And now they are talking about an ice rink at the park in the HOC. Has anybody else noticed how most of the press on that issue doesn’t disclosed the fact that the foundation that wants to do this will only fund the reoccurring costs for the first five years and then the City of Burnsville takes over financial responsibility? Just another example of how the City of Burnsville controls what information gets out and what doesn’t!
April 29th, 2009 at 6:37 am
KJ are you secretly hanging out at our dinner table most nights? Because your comment is like a mirror of some of the conversations “Mr. Whit” and I have had about Burnsville. I can’t help but think that there are so many other people “out there” who think the same way/are talking about the same topics at the dinner table each night. I know we’re “preaching to the choir” sometimes, but I really would like to hear from a PAC/HOC supporter to hear what they are thinking now. I would hope that I would be as open-minded to hear and truly consider what they had to say – the exact opposite of the treatment that was afforded by the Mayor/Gustafson/Workman to the opponents of the PAC in the first place. It upsets me too that all we hear from city hall is – nothing – about it. Just man up and admit that mistakes were made. Then give some real thought to how to make it better – instead of burying your head in the sand and pretending its all going to get better by doing nothing, or repeating the same mistakes (like the ice rink), all over again.
April 29th, 2009 at 10:44 am
Whit, unless I’m doing it in my sleep (or subliminally) I’ve not heard a single conversation between you and “Mr. Whit”.
I suspect there are many of us out here who were not supporters of the PAC or certain aspects of the HOC. We who were forward thinking enough to see these issues coming. I only hope that we are not just preaching to the choir and that some citizens (or even city officials) who were supporters of the PAC/HOC are reading our comments. We have the right, we voiced our opposition in advance, we cannot be tagged with having a “hindsight is 20/20″ mentality. And for those above stated reasons, what supporter or city official would come here and comment on the subject when they can’t say anything good or paint us as the bad guy.
I would “LOVE” to have that discussion/debate. I would love to have an intelligent and diplomatic discussion here about the PAC and HOC with someone (especially Mayor Kautz) who at one time did or still does support the whole HOC and PAC concept and expenditures. An open and honest discussion about where we’re at, how we got here and what we should do now. If someone out there reading this thinks this sounds like a “dare”, you’re right, bring it on.
Now to show that I’m not spiteful, I don’t want the HOC or PAC to fail. They exist, they are built, it’s done and that’s water under the bridge. As a “stakeholder”, I would love nothing more than to see them succeed and flourish because if they do, we the citizens of Burnsville will benefit from them. But if they don’t succeed, we will pay and pay and PAY. At this point, those who support these endeavors are still in denial and are reluctant to even share information about the level of success/failure of these projects.
At this point, I want honesty from the City, stop telling everybody that the operation “made” $45k through the end of February. Be honest, tell us that it actually “lost” about $148k in that time period. Disclose the facts, make the PAC budget and financial information readily available. Admit right now that it is “highly likely” that the PAC will lose more money than projected in 2009. Don’t come to us at the end of the year and tell us that the PAC didn’t “perform” up to our expectations. That last thing I want to see is the City of Burnsville telling us next January that the PAC ‘s losses were triple what was predicted and we now have another budget crisis on our hands.
It’s like people who have an addiction, first you have to admit you have a problem and then we can have a serious discussion about how to solve them! And I’m not holding my breath while I wait for that to happen.
Mayor Kautz is too busy trying to keep seasonal lighting and flower baskets. She’s too busy trying to get traffic lights and skating rinks. She’s just plain way too busy to concern herself these minor and insignificant issues that arise because of the policies and projects she pushed through. She’s has more important things to do, like gear up to do it all over again when it’s time to redevelop the river quadrant, the place she plans to retire.
And as a side note, I hope Liz Workman enjoyed her “going away” party. While that in itself was good news, it cost the taxpayers of Burnsville millions of dollars to throw that party! And God help the fool who ever even suggests that the City of Burnsville name the PAC the “Elizabeth Kautz Performing Arts Center”. Ooops, did I just say that? Does that make me the fool? Naw, she’d never let her name be put on something that is likely to go down faster than the Titanic!
April 29th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
I re-iterate that I was applying a generalization. Certainly there are well intended individuals that work within government. But we all have to be willing to admit that certain types of jobs, attract certain types of people. And those jobs, particularly in local government, tend to attract a group of people that generally feel that they know what’s best for everyone. And as such, are not motivated to provide the public information if they feel the public doesn’t need to know it. (Regardless of what the law orders them to tell you).
I apologize for taking Tim’s comment out of context. I believe he missed my admitted generalization, and I missed his specificity.