Stairs lead to the second floor of the Lewis County Courthouse.
The Board of Lewis County Commissioners has been working to streamline its public disclosure process and will soon be initiating several changes to provide consistency with requests.
Departments under the commissioners, as well as offices of elected officials who choose to participate, will funnel their requests to the newly created position of a public disclosure manager.
Casey Mauermann has been hired into that role and will start on Aug. 22.
Mauermann has been handling public disclosure requests for the county’s Prosecutor’s Office and Sheriff’s Office for the last year and a half.
Each department will select a point person to receive requests, which will then be sent on to Mauermann.
“Everything that is going to be released under the BOCC, and those who choose to out of the elected offices, will come through our public disclosure manager,” Paulette Young, risk manager for the county, said. “We want consistency on how things are being released, which redactions are being used, and so this is going to bring consistency on how everybody is receiving the information.”
Mauermann will work with Kim Amrine, who has been processing requests for the commissioners and their departments. Amrine would help Mauermann until the end of August, when she would then transition as the point person for disclosures within public works.
Amrine told commissioners she has about 250 public disclosures requests currently open — 98 percent of which are from the same person. The overlap will allow the transition to go smoother, staff said.
“We’re taking a lot of requests obviously from one or two individuals that are modeling our policy,” Young said. “I hate to make policy for the minority but we have to look at this.”
Commissioners had previously complained about a flood of requests from Brian Green and Brian Cortland, two individuals who settled this week with the county commissioners for $20,000 plus attorney fees after suing over apparent violations of the state Open Public Meetings Act earlier this year.
A fee schedule for requests is expected to be approved by the end of September. It will likely require requesters to pay for the most recent installment, before the next one is processed. That will help ease the workload. Amrine said out of 67 requests she closed for one individual, only two of them had been viewed.
The county will continue to use GovQA, a system that helps local governments with public records requests, but will likely find a different way to process public records requests payment after two new public records laws came into effect.
GovQA offers a payment module, but the cost of setup could cost the county as much as $12,000 during the first year.
The county will use the fee schedule provided in the law, which allows agencies to charge a fee of 10 cents per page scanned into an electronic format, 5 cents for every four electronic attachments uploaded to an electronic delivery system, and 10 cents per gigabyte transmitting records electronically. Agencies also have the option to charge a flat rate of $2 and have the ability to waive any fees that are determined unwarranted.
The money will go to offset the cost of processing public records.
“It will still be a loss, for sure, but we can offset some of those costs,” Young said.
Steve Wohld, the county’s IT manager, said the county could set up a point and pay terminal that would allow requestors to pay for their records.
Since Amrine has a busy workload with public works-related projects, she told commissioners she could only spend four hours a week working on requests. Since the sole responsibility of the public records manager is to process requests, it will later become a full time job once Mauermann is in her role.
A new deputy prosecuting attorney has also been hired to help answer legal questions regarding public records requests.
“It has been determined that we were going to hire a public disclosure attorney over there (at the Prosecutor’s Office) because civil attorneys were taking so much time answering questions and weeding through all the public disclosures and legal questions,” Young said.
Ross Petersen was hired for the position.
Petersen, who lives in Boistfort, was previously the chief deputy clerk in Island County. He has worked for the Law Offices of Laurel Smith in Rochester and the Washington State Public Disclosure Commission.
On Monday, commissioners will vote on a resolution to fund risk management for the administration of public disclosure requests and public records management. The money will come out of a fund where unassigned insurance disbursements were deposited in October 2013.
