Citizens with huge records requests may go to back of the line, Gig Harbor council told
Citizens making large public records requests of the City of Gig Harbor may have to wait a little longer for their files if the City Council approves changes to a city ordinance.
The council got its first look Monday, Sept. 13 at a revision that would allow the city clerk to fill requests out of order, so that smaller, easier requests could be filled first. Fees would not change.
Interim City Clerk Josh Stecker explained that big, time-consuming requests hold up the queue, making it harder to fill smaller ones.
The proposed changes won’t “prevent us from responding in a timely manner, it just allows us to say to the requester, ‘This is going to take a little more time,’” Stecker told the council.
“Eighty percent of our requests are really simple, locating one document,” he told the council. But, “occasionally the city receives requests that require a lot of staff time and require extensive attorney review.”
Examples, he said in an interview, would be requests for “any and all” emails between a council member and anyone else, or a request for a large number of old records, which would require a hand search among documents stored at the city’s wastewater treatment plant.
“For anything more than 12 or 15 years old, someone actually has to dig through cardboard boxes, and that takes staff time,” he told The Gateway. Records that need to be redacted for privacy reasons also take a lot of time — excepted names need to be blacked out one by one.
Cap on staff time
The suggested ordinance would set a cap of eight hours a week of staff time spent on filling public records requests, so that the work doesn’t interfere with other essential functions. Presently, that task takes up an average of six and a half hours a week, he said. Requests that would exceed the cap would be set over to the following week.
In practice, city staff have always done this, Stecker said in an interview, but “this gives us a formal policy.”
Fees for copies — 10 cents a page for paper or scans, 5 cents for four digital pages — would not change.
The change would also allow serial filers to be told, “We’re not going to start working on your new request until we’ve finished your last one,” Stecker said.
Stecker said people requesting public records were “a good mix,” including construction companies looking for information on capital projects they want to bid on, homeowners looking for information about their own property, and “some that are just fishing expeditions.”
State law allows cities to refuse requests that are too broad, such as “every email sent in the last year by anybody,” Stecker said, but city staff will work with citizens to narrow their requests to workable form.
The council will vote on the proposed ordinance at its next meeting, Sept. 27.
Village at Harbor Hill gets green light
Also on Monday, Sept. 13 the council learned that a longstanding suit against the city by Olympic Property Group has been finally dismissed, leaving the developer free to begin building The Village at Harbor Hill, a retail development in North Gig Harbor that may include a long-awaited grocery store.
The 2019 suit alleged that the city improperly raised traffic impact fees on the project. In a settlement signed in August of last year, the city agreed to adjust the way it calculates the impact fees, saving the developer about $1.1 million. In return, OPG agreed to pay for street lights and other traffic improvements.
An unintended consequence of the suit was the delay of the Harbor Hill grocery store, which had been highly anticipated by nearby residents, including some in Heron’s Key, a senior-living community. Because of the delay, a deal with Town & Country markets fell through. Jon Rose, the company president, said last year he is looking for a new grocery tenant.
In other business, the council:
▪ Heard from Council Member Bob Himes that his Planning and Building Committee is considering whether the city should begin to regulate short-term rental housing, such as Airbnbs, which are growing more common. “We definitely ruled out any kind of ban, but there is a feeling that we should have the ability to monitor and regulate this kind of activity,” he said.
▪ Heard from Planning Director Katrina Knudson that the city is still in talks with Pierce County about negotiating an urban growth management agreement, with the aim of aligning county and city development standards in the city’s Urban Growth Area. The issue has come to the fore recently with the clearing of a thickly-wooded lot on the county side of 38th Street, the city boundary, for a development that will put 13 houses on 4 acres.
This story was originally published September 16, 2021 at 5:00 AM.