by Joe Wilhelm Jr.
Staff Writer
An issue of access to public records that the City’s Ethics Commission felt was adequately addressed previously by the Office of General Counsel will be revisited by the commission in March.
The Ethics Commission held its first meeting outside of City Hall Tuesday at Florida Coastal School of Law in an effort to make itself more accessible to the public. At this meeting the commission also discussed complaints about access to public records that were detailed in an Oct. 7 Folio Weekly article titled, “Stadium Scam.”
After the article was published, the Commission asked Ethics Officer Carla Miller to investigate the details of the article and it also requested the City’s Office of General Counsel respond to accusations that it hadn’t properly addressed Folio’s records requests. A letter was sent to Commission Chair Jay Williams from Assistant General Counsel Stephen Powell addressing the claims in the article and the Commission agreed at its Nov. 24 meeting that their request had been satisfied and no further action needed to be taken.
This was the case until article author Marvin Edwards submitted a 14-page response and attorney Gray Thomas submitted a five-page response to Williams’ rebutting points made in Powell’s letter to the Commission.
The Commission agreed to invite all parties involved in the matter to sit down and discuss what happened during this fact-finding process.
“We want to bring everyone who has made a complaint about this issue to the table so we can hear what they have to say,” said Braxton Gillam, chair of the Legislative Subcommittee of the Ethics Commission. “I have requested two hours for that meeting because we want to hear what people have to say.”
The meeting is scheduled for March 11 during the monthly Legislative Subcommittee meeting. The subcommittee’s purpose is to evaluate the current code and determine if changes needed to be made.
“I remain concerned that our code remains incomplete,” said Gillam, who is also an attorney with Milam Howard. “It talks about investigative powers, but doesn’t have a structure in place to illustrate how that can be done.”
In addition to investigating the complaints, Gillam plans to take a look at the authority of the Commission to evaluate the complaints it receives.
“We need to evaluate what our authorities are,” said Gillam. “And if we don’t have the authority to investigate these complaints, why don’t we and, if we should, how do we get there?”
The Office of General Counsel was represented at Tuesday’s meeting by Chief Deputy General Counsel Cindy Laquidara, who was receptive to helping the commission find the answers they were looking for.
“I will make anyone in my office with Sunshine Law and public documents backgrounds avail-able to assist and answer questions,” said Laquidara, “so we can get this festering sore over with and get all of the questions answered.”
One of the problems people might be facing when requesting public records is that they might not know what document to ask for, said Laquidara. This process needs to be reviewed in the eyes of Miller, to make it easier for citizens to access information.
“If we can’t make it easier for citizens to get records and feel like their government is open, then we are missing out on an important function of this commission, so how we define that is crucial over the next couple of months,” said Miller.
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