The Iowa Freedom of Information Council and two other members of the media will be paid $175,000 to settle two lawsuits that accused Governor Reynolds and her staff of violating open records laws.
The settlements were approved by the state treasurer and the director of the Iowa Department of Management, who are members of the State Appeal Board. State Auditor Rob Sand, the board’s third member, was the lone no.
“Yet another example of insiders making taxpayers pay for their own wrongdoing and we shouldn’t take it anymore,” says Sand, the only Democrat in elected statewide office.
The lawsuits stemmed from public records requests made to state agencies over a year and a half, starting back in April 2020. Attorneys for the governor argued in court that there is no specific deadline in state law for fulfilling public records requests. In April of this year, the Iowa Supreme Court called the delayed responses unreasonable.
“I mean the Supreme Court’s ruling was to reject a bunch of arguments that aren’t respectable enough to have been made in the first place,” Sand says. “They tried to say: ‘Oh, well, because we never said, “No,” to these public records requests, we haven’t actually withheld records.'”
Sand says the governor’s office failed to reply to some public records requests for up to a year. “And now they want taxpayers to pay the costs of hiding information from the public,” Sand says. “It’s ridiculous.”
Kollin Crompton, deputy communications director for Governor Reynolds, says the COVID-19 response “put unprecedented demands on the governor’s team to meet the immediate needs of Iowans” and public records requests were “unintentionally delayed.” Crompton says those delays were “not acceptable” and the governor’s office continues to “reevaluate the process to improve timeliness.”