Editorial: Hiding the facts

The City of Storm Lake and its law firm, Dorsey and Whitney, stand at odds with the law by refusing to reveal to the public the contents of invoices sent by the law firm to City Hall for services rendered in the lawsuit against Buena Vista County over tax increment financing.

We asked the city to provide us invoices regarding the lawsuit involving some $5 million in TIF revenue that the county sent to the wrong accounts, and not to the city as required. The city responded by providing invoices totaling just over $144,000, but blacked out what the charges related to. The city claims it is attorney-client “work product” and as such privileged.

It is nothing of the sort. An invoice is payment demand for work product. It is a public record. The public has a right to know what the bill is for. Is it for sandwiches or a brief on a motion to dismiss? The public deserves to know since we are paying the bill. In the Des Moines Water Works lawsuit against Buena Vista County, the lawyers charged $450 per hour to read our editorials. You should be aware.

Randy Evans, executive director of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council, has corresponded with the city to little avail, urging officials to fully comply with the public records law and release the invoices unredacted where sensitive legal strategies are not disclosed.

The law firm can dress an invoice without showing its undergarments. The city is provoking a controversy where none should exist.

It’s not as if revealing legal strategy matters at this point. The judge has blown up the city legal strategy by eliminating all but one of its claims: that the county should pay to the city what TIF funds it wrongly kept in the county treasury. That won’t cover the invoices, if the city were successful in court. Given the record to date, success is not on the horizon.

The city and county should take a legal strategy of settling this stupid lawsuit. They will spend a million dollars getting a worthless case to trial. As long as it is your money, they will blow it on a pointless argument. The court should find a way to force them into settlement: The county pays the city a couple million dollars and the lawyers return to their crouch with the meter off.

Even if they settled this thing tomorrow, the public still deserves to know how our money was spent and why. To that end, we will continue to press the matter through the Iowa Freedom of Information Council, a non-profit that pursues government transparency. We trust local officials will take a more enlightened view of transparency, and a more realistic view of their prospects, before the matter is forced to the Iowa Public Information Board or to district court. That would be a needless expense when sheer openness and honesty with one’s own position — that you are losing this lawsuit — would lead you to be more amenable to the public. Instead, the city holds all manner of information, from crime to debt, close to the vest for fear of embarrassment or just because they can.

We deserve generally unredacted records. That is what the law demands.

Beyond that, the city should take the attitude that this is a public enterprise in all affairs. The city would prefer to deny information or attempt to control it clumsily, or to spin reality to make you believe that all the hatches are buttoned down. All government officials have to do is comply with the law. Just be candid. It’s simple. It costs nothing.

We must ask for full disclosure to know how the city operates. Why does downtown flood? Why is Geneseo Street such a rumble? Why do we not have funds for it? Why are our tax bills ballooning? How much debt does the city have? Why can’t you tell us? Whose business is this, anyhow?

The city and county previously dismissed the idea of a state audit to examine how the county auditor’s office and the assessor’s office at the time misdirected presumably millions of dollars in TIF revenues to the wrong accounts. We still do not know the full amount of the lost funds for lack of an audit. We should know that, for a start. City and county officials would rather lawyer up and fight it out, costs be damned. Let the streets rot before we lay down the pike. Citizens of Storm Lake get to pay coming and going, as denizens of both the city and county. Those citizens are not entitled to the facts, in the view of local government officials. Democracy is grand so long as you can keep it. Democracy needs sunshine to survive.