An allegedly hostile workplace is the least of the concerns in the fight over an investigation into Federal Way’s Municipal Court.
What’s really at stake here is Washington’s open records law, and public access to countless government documents that might embarrass one official or another.
Background: The public eruption of a feud between Presiding Judge Michael Morgan and now-departed Judge Colleen Hartl reportedly led an employee to allege that the court has a hostile, stressful atmosphere. City Attorney Pat Richardson hired an independent attorney to investigate.
Now Morgan is trying to suppress the lawyer’s report, claiming that it is exempt from public scrutiny as a matter of attorney-client confidences. Morgan says he was the client and Richardson his attorney.
Richardson begs to differ; she says she wasn’t acting as Morgan’s attorney and the report is a public document. The News Tribune has joined the arguments in King County Superior Court to prevent the burial of the investigation.
This is about far more than a single report. Among the precedents Morgan invokes is a recent Washington Supreme Court ruling, Soter v. Cowles Publishing Co. The 5-4 decision threatens to dangerously expand attorney-client privilege by allowing officials to suppress their internal communications when a lawyer is in the loop – if they claim a lawsuit might be filed about the issue involved. There’s no telling how many government documents could be hidden from public scrutiny on this pretext – just by involving an attorney and expressing fear of litigation.
Three cheers for Richardson. Municipal attorneys are too often on the wrong side of public disclosure issues, erring on the side of protecting the officials they advise. She understands that this report belongs to the citizens, not to Morgan or the municipal court.
Why should it be otherwise? In this case, a public official – Richardson – ordered a taxpayer-funded probe of possible wrongdoing and obvious dysfunction in Federal Way’s court. Morgan’s own lawyers say he was the main target of the investigation.
If the superior court were to let him suppress the report, it would be giving him license to censor a document he apparently finds embarrassing. This is precisely what Washington’s open records law was written to forbid.
But it’s also precisely the danger created by Soter v. Cowles. If Morgan succeeds in telling the public to butt out of the municipal court’s problems, the worst fears about that ruling will have been borne out.
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