elpasospeak

The proposed ordinance has another dark side to it.

“Any person in the private possession of a Local Government Record of the City of El Paso, Texas, where that possession is not authorized by law, is hereby ordered and shall immediately return and/or surrender any said record to Records Retention personnel of the City of El Paso, Texas, pursuant to Texas Local Government Code Section202.005(a). Any person who seeks and follows documented instructions from retention personnel of the City, are deemed to have satisfied any and all duties created by this ordinance and State law.”

City staff and city council have something up their collective sleeves here and I have not figured it out.

The ordinance complains that the state laws are ambiguous.  Then they write this provision that is almost impossible to understand.

Does a copy of a record qualify?

If someone is given a document by a government employee must the document be returned?

Are there specific laws allowing you and I to possess various government documents?  Is there a law that says you and I can hold a traffic ticket in our possession?  Must we give it back to the police officer who issued it?  Sorry officer, this is a public record and by law I cannot hold on to it in El Paso.

This looks to me to be an attempt to get into the private files of local businesses.

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

Cato

The city lawyers evidently don’t worry too much about grammar or clarity in their own proposed ordinance.  They write:

An example of communications that are not the transaction of official business are:

1. Political communications by an employee, volunteer or elected/appointed office holder;

2. Communications by and between employees related to personal employee involvement in union related affairs;

3. Other communications by an employee, volunteer or elected/appointed official, had on behalf of another organization or entity while or in connection with transacting business on that organization’s behalf, whether the business is a for-profit, nonprofit, or other governmental or quasi-governmental entity; or,

4. Personal communications made in the individual’s personal capacity that are not communications made in the official capacity held by the person engaged in the communication.

Look at number 3.  An elected official transacting business for a non-city entity?  Are they trying to legitimatize this severe conflict of interest?  This should somehow not be public information?  Does getting elected to city council mean you can peddle influence and be protected from public exposure?  Can this be an accident of wording, or are these people that arrogant?

Then we have number 4.  “It wasn’t a lie if I had my fingers crossed” or “You didn’t say Simon Says”.  Who gets to decide if the official is communicating personally or officially?  I suppose these guys will say it is up to the individual.

Talk about ambiguous.  They use the singular article “an” and then list four things.  Does that mean that only the first one is an example of a transaction that is not official business?

This whole thing stinks.  The state law works quite well.  If they did not have something big to hide they would not be bringing this ordinance forward.

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

Cato

Regardless of which communications you and I might believe should be held private, the council’s proposed new ordinance overlooks a really big issue.

Texas law says that records created or maintained with public money are public property.

“Local government records created or received in the transaction or official business or the creation or maintenance of which were paid for by public funds are declared to be public property …”

Who wrote the e-mails and the capacity they were serving at the time are not important if the e-mails are stored on city property or with city money.  They are public property by state law.  The Public Information Act does consider certain types of communication in e-mails (like account and phone numbers) to be private and thus not subject to disclosure.  People are already protected.

This ordinance is a sham.

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

Cato

Where to start?

The premise of city council’s dandy new proposal is contained in one of their “WHERAS’s”.  Put simply, city council thinks that the Texas legislature is a bunch of incompetent boobs.  Council says so when they write:

WHEREAS, the City Council finds that “the transaction of official business” as used in the Texas Public Information Act and the Texas Local Government Records Act is not defined by Texas law; that the term is ambiguous, can cause confusion …”

A quick search on the term “official business” in the data base of Texas statutes finds the term used in laws 33 times.  While these laws are often pretty specific about defining terms, the city may be right in that it is never specifically defined.

Why?  Because even the village idiot knows what it means.  Doing business with a government official that the government official is chartered to perform by law or by the nature of his office is pretty much the definition that a jury of your peers would apply.

The city proposes much the same language in it’s new ordinance.  So what’s going on here?

The ordinance is not about defining “official business”.  The legislature, you and I, and even city council already know what it is.  The ordinance is about trying to make exempt from the law certain types of communication.  That will be covered in another article.

After calling the legislators idiots, they accuse them of causing illegal action.

“…that the term is ambiguous, can cause confusion as to the duties of City Representatives and, alternative definitions may result in the illegal intrusion into individual privacy rights of all city employees …”

Are we lucky or what?  But for the selfless efforts of our benevolent city council and lawyers we would be thrown into a pit of confusion caused by those numbskulls at the legislature.

This is about trying to cover up e-mails relating to the ball park and the downtown moves.  Council hopes to rush an ordinance through  so that when they are forced under existing laws to turn over the documents they will be able to point to their new rules which they will claim supersede the state rules.

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

Cato