Since the state Open Government Act became law in 1973, citizens have been able to obtain information with relative ease from their governments.

In Bainbridge Island, the amount of requests is astoundingly high in relation to other comparable cities and the amount of time and money it takes to fulfill these requests are becoming more burdensome, claim city officials.

When Mark Dombroski started as the city administrator in March, employees weren’t keeping track of their hours spent fulfilling public record requests. Since then, he has set a new policy requiring staff to log hours, making it clear just how much time the city spends responding to the public.

In the period from May 2008 to August 2008 there were just over 937 hours of time logged between 32 different staff members working on requests. Billed at an hourly rate, the total cost for this four-month period is estimated at $29,238. The hours spent by employees are charged to the city. Requesters only pay for the production of disclosure materials – $3,325 so far this year for copying and CD production.

Alarmed at the amount of money the city is spending on requests, the administration conducted a survey in July that looked at five comparable cities (the same cities used by CH2MHill in the 2006 benchmarking study) and gathered the amount of records requests they had received since 2006. Only one city came close to the high-bar set by Bainbridge citizens for disclosure requests. Sammamish had 700 public disclosure requests in 2007, while Bainbridge had 861 that year.

As of Aug. 12, 2008, the city had roughly 503 public-disclosure requests, setting pace for another 800-request year. An electronic database on information requests was set up by the city in 2006. Still, the numbers are startling to Dombroski.

“Public records requests are an important part of our business, but the sheer number is what overwhelmed me and it is a challege to meet those demands,” he said. “This year we will have more than 800, which is a lot.”

Requests range from things as simple as printing out reports or permits, to taking employees offline in order to track down records that go back 10 to 15 years. Just because more and more records are being digitized, Dombroski said, doesn’t mean that requests are easier to fulfill.

“We have a very liberal interpretation of public records and it is tough to make sure you have every record on a certain subject,” Dombroski said.

“(Being online) means we have a thousand different places to search. There is also the issue of email retentions and people using different names for the same thing. It is a real challenge.”

Given that state law requires a response to a public request must occur within five days, the time and money dedicated to public disclosure by staff almost warrants a full-time position.

“There has been a push for a dedicated full-time person for a public records, but now we are in the midsts of reducing staff,” Dombroski said. “Now we have part-time coming in to fulfill these requests.”

Which doesn’t mean that current staff aren’t inundated with disclosure workloads. In the same four-month period, Roz Lassoff, the city clerk, spent over 228 hours, Christine Brown of the legal department logged over 210 hours and Karl Shaw of the finance department marked over 120 hours responding to the public.

At some point the question has to be raised, how does the workload affect the functionality of our local government?

“It takes too much time,” Mayor Darlene Kordonowy said. “I will stand side by side with any citizen to request a public disclosure. At the same time, I look at the number of hours and the number of people that are fulfilling these requests, the number of hours it takes, there is something out of balance here.”

Kordonowy believes that many of the requests the city spends time on are frivolous and, despite the public’s right to information, some people are simply trying dig up dirt that doesn’t exist.

“We get requests weekly from some people in the community so I really question the motives to that and what they are trying to find,” Kordonowy said. “Over the time that this has been happening, no one has found any information that puts the city with a public relations problem, or a felony, or audit situations. Every time they come forward and go to an auditor it has been found that our practices and procedures and information has been accurate. So I don’t know what is being gained from these requests.”

Kordonowy said it may be time for the city to make more information available online in order to reduce the amount of hours spent on public disclosure.

“Records management is an area that we can improve on,” Kordonowy said. “There is so much information and managing that is a real cost and an obligation, but how do you balance that?”