Tallahassee Democrat by Jeffrey Schweers
January 2, 2018
City of Tallahassee and Tallahassee Democrat attorneys have negotiated a settlement over a lawsuit alleging city officials violated the Florida Public Records Act that could set a precedent for other local governments across the state.
Tallahassee Democrat Publisher Skip Foster said the newspaper had to seek the judgment to which the City has agreed to preserve the public’s right to know.
“This is a landmark settlement for the citizens of Tallahassee and the entire state of Florida,” said Foster. “The city has admitted it broke the state’s public records law and is now putting into place innovative new policies and procedures to make sure it doesn’t happen again. We are pleased to avoid litigation that ultimately would have been costly for Tallahassee taxpayers and appreciate the willingness of the city attorney to work with us on this matter.”
The suit alleges that City Manager Rick Fernandez, who is on a paid leave of absence pending the outcome of a state ethics investigation, deleted text messages that showed he asked a local lobbyist for four expensive sky box tickets to a Florida State football game in 2016.
The lobbyist worked at the time of the request for a Unconventional Strategies, a firm that is at the heart of a federal investigation of the city-county Community Redevelopment Agency and several key business leaders.
A subpoena of the lobbying firm by the Florida State Commission on Ethics as part of its investigation of Fernandez produced the text messages in question. On Nov. 29, the Democrat sued over the fact that the text messages were public records, but the city did not retain them and were unable to produce them when requested, in violation of the public records act.
Under the settlement agreement, which is expected to be on Wednesday’s City Commission agenda, the city will formally admit to a violation of the public records law. It also will agree to establish a public records retention policy that could be a model for other cities in the Sunshine State to follow, a spokesman for the Florida Press Association said.
Up until now the city has had no policy for retaining text messages.
City Commissioner Curtis Richardson said the case with Fernandez was an exception to the city’s strong tradition of transparency and complying with public records requests.
“We didn’t know the city manager had deleted those text messages for whatever reason,” Richardson said. “If this is what we need to do to continue that transparency we are prepared to do that. If it includes admitting we violated the public records law, unintentionally I believe, but if we did, we did.”
