St. Louis City to Restore Transparency Portal Search Functionality
A few months back, local transparency watchdog Gerry Connolly noticed a change in the city’s “Sunshine Law” request portal. The web portal allows residents, academics, journalists, and others to request information and documents using the state’s public records request law. While doing his own research, Connolly noticed that there had been changes to the portal’s search functionality. According to Connolly, this change happened soon after the Spencer administration took office. “Since the early weeks of the administration, responsive records to ‘sunshine’ requests are no longer available for public view for any city governmental body. Only the requester has access,” said Connolly.
For years, documents produced by public record requests were added to a publicly searchable database, meaning that interested parties could search the database for documents and information that they were seeking, potentially saving them the time involved with requesting something that has already been produced for someone else. This meant that the results of these requests were available for journalists, academics, and the general public. It also saves city staffers’ time, as they would not be required to gather and produce the documents that have already been given to other parties. In turn, this would allow city staffers to direct their time and energy toward completing information requests for new documents. By restricting the results of searches only to the individual who requested the documents, the portal’s research usefulness was significantly diminished.
When contacted about the change, the mayor’s office says the shift was unintentional. “It appears an error has resulted in some records not being made available to people other than the requester. There has not been a policy change, so this will be corrected going forward,” said Mayor Spencer’s spokesperson, Rasmus Jorgensen. For his part, Connelly says that he is happy to hear that the city will reverse the change to the portal search function.
Connelly also noted that St. Louis Development Corporation (SLDC) has never provided the same level of searchability, despite also using the portal for public record requests. “Since the inception of the portal, SLDC‘s records have only been made available to the requester,” stated Connelly. Given the prominence of campaign promises focused on increased transparency at SLDC, the mayor’s office was also asked if they would make SDLC’s public records request similarly searchable. The mayor’s office declined to comment and suggested that SLDC be contacted regarding the issue.
SLDC was contacted and asked why their public information search results restrict document visibility to the requester. SLDC’s Vice President of Communications and Public Affairs Deion Braxton responded, “Once SLDC provides a Sunshine request to a person, we will provide those same results to another person who requests the same documentation.”
UPDATE: This story was updated to include a quote from SLDC’s Deion Braxton.
