General Discussion

BigBearJohn

(11,410 posts) Fri Oct 9, 2015, 04:53 AM Oct 2015

Government Transparency Website Catches Kim Davis Refusing To Do Her Job Again

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2015/10/07/government-transparency-website-catches-kim-davis-refusing-to-do-her-job-again-screenshots/

It seems that along with her religious convictions, Kim Davis also has “deeply held beliefs” about complying with open records requests. Specifically, she seems to be of the opinion that the Kentucky Open Records Act’s requirement that agencies comply with a requestor’s wishes that documents be provided in their original format is open to interpretation…or that it can be ignored entirely.

The KORA makes it crystal clear that,upon the payment of a reasonable fee, an agency — like Davis’ office — “must” provide documents (like emails) in electronic format if they are available. Unfortunately, the government transparency and news web site MuckRock has been encountering some difficulties as Davis herself is being quite, quite, difficult about their request for her emails.

In fact, it seems as though Davis is intentionally adding unnecessary costs to the fulfillment of the request by insisting that she print, copy, and mail the emails rather than forward them. “As a public employee, Kim Davis’s emails are subject to the Kentucky Open Records Act (KORA),” MuckRock’s Shawn Musgrave wrote in a blog post on Wednesday. “A couple days before Davis was jailed for contempt of court, I requested all of her emails from the past month. When news of her visit to the Vatican embassy broke, I submitted additional requests for emails with papal keywords.”

While Davis herself responded rather promptly to the request, Davis cited a $1,200 price tag for the more than 6,000 emails that have piled up in her inbox. While Davis is absolutely entitled to charge reasonable fees for the time and work involved in fulfilling requests, Musgrave notes that “more than half of that fee estimate was for photocopies and postage.”