Gainesville City Commission votes to expand transparency of public records software

BY JENNIFER CABRERA

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – At the February 22 General Policy Committee meeting, the Gainesville City Commission voted to sell the old Fire Station 1 property, heard a presentation about transparency policies in other cities and counties, and voted to “flip the switch” in their JustFOIA public records system to make fulfilled records requests available to the public.

Old fire station

The old fire station at 427 South Main Street was vacated in 2018 when the new Fire Station 1 was completed. Phil Mann, Special Adviser to the City Manager, said a structural study of the building in 2020 showed that it needed about $4.4 million in work to make it usable, and he said the estimate has probably gone up another million dollars since then. The City previously issued a Request for Proposals (RFP) to find a company that was willing to do a joint project with UF to renovate the building as part of a lease, and no viable proposals were received.

Staff reached out to companies that downloaded the RFP but didn’t submit proposals, and the companies said they didn’t pursue the RFP because they were looking to purchase, not lease; the City began working on an RFP to sell the building, but the administration at UF changed, and UF was no longer interested in using the building. Mann said the staff recommendation now is to sell the building outright.

Commissioner Ed Book interjected that St. Francis House “is being sold… and the timeline for that is within the next year,” and their one-acre parcel was appraised at $3.8 million, so he believed that the fire station property will appraise at a value above that.

Mann continued, saying that lockers were previously built at the old fire station so homeless people could secure their belongings there during the day and camp on the property at night; the City also provided porta-potties. He said the arrangement worked for a while but then “became a maintenance issue for the City and for the surrounding neighbors. The vendor for the porta-potties actually pulled them out and said if it cost him our business, so be it, because they were so badly abused.”

Commissioner Reina Saco asked about the zoning on the property, and Chief Operating Officer Andrew Persons said the height can be as tall as 12 to 14 stories and the density can be 150 to 175 units per acre. Saco said the property could be used entirely for affordable housing or could provide 16 or 17 affordable units if the Commission passes an upcoming Inclusive Housing ordinance that would require developers to set aside 10% of new units as affordable housing.

Mayor Harvey Ward cautioned commissioners to “be careful of projecting your wishes onto it. If we put it onto the market, it will be used for whatever the market wishes.”

Claw-back provision?

Commissioner Bryan Eastman said he just didn’t want the property to sit vacant, and Mann said they could put a restriction on the sale that if it’s not developed by a certain deadline, the City could “claw it back.”

Motion

Commissioner Cynthia Chestnut said she wasn’t interested in a claw-back provision because the City would have to refund the money. She made a motion to authorize the City Manager to move forward with the sale of the property after acquiring a new appraisal, and Book seconded the motion.

Saco asked what the claw-back price would be (the answer was that there are various options) and then asked Chestnut to add a request for staff to bring back more information on what claw-back options “could look like – I think put out, like, a chart of the pros and cons of each option and what is… the possibility of being pro-rated, the possibility of just nothing… I think it just kind of gives us a more informed view before we agree to what the sale will look like.” Chestnut agreed to add that to the motion, “as long as you know how concerned I am with paying the money back.”

Public comment

During public comment on the motion, Jo Beaty suggested asking the City Manager to bring the RFP back before it is issued so the Commission can get more input into it. Persons explained that the City will not be issuing an RFP: “We’re putting the property out for sale… if we have any responses from that, those would come back to the Commission for consideration.”

City Manager Cynthia Curry said she would come back to the Commission after the appraisal is complete, “and then the direction can be given to me at that time.”

City Clerk Kristen Bryant restated the motion: “Authorize the City Manager to move forward with the sale of the GFR Fire Station #1, located at 47 South Main Street, after a new property appraisal, and then have staff provide options for a claw-back provision and the feasibility of that provision.” Chestnut said the second piece would be “to return to the Commission with the recommendation from the Manager.”

Curry said the first step would be an appraisal, “so can we just take that step and come back?”

The motion, as stated above, passed 6-0, with Commissioner Desmon Duncan-Walker absent. 

Public access and transparency policies

Moving on to a policy research item requested by Book, former Policy Research Fellow Evan Smith presented his research on various public access and transparency policies in Florida cities and counties. 

Publication of commissioner emails

Smith found that policies on the publication of commissioner emails in the 14 jurisdictions that were considered were “either all or nothing.” He said Gainesville was the only city in the group that gave commissioners the option of whether to publish their emails, and Alachua County was the only jurisdiction that published all emails. Smith said none of the other jurisdictions published commissioner emails, so emails must be requested by the public in those jurisdictions. 

Public records requests

Smith said that about half the jurisdictions use an online portal (like JustFOIA, which is used by the City of Gainesville) for public records requests. He said all the jurisdictions have a formal policy of fulfilling requests in “the most reasonable time,” but informally, the policies range from 24 hours to 10 days to try to complete a request. He said the amount of staff time a request can take before the jurisdiction starts charging a fee ranges from 15 minutes in Gainesville to 30 minutes in other cities to two hours in Tallahassee. 

Smith said every jurisdiction live-streams commission meetings, and about half of them selectively pick other meetings to stream, depending on which are deemed the most important. He said Gainesville streams “major boards… like Planning and Zoning, Charter Review,” but for other cities, the decision has more to do with the location, so “if it’s in the chambers, then it’s recorded, no matter what type of meeting it is.”

“We are, despite popular belief, weirdly liberal with our public access, rules, and processes”

Saco said she had seen almost the same presentation in 2019 and added, “We are, despite popular belief, weirdly liberal with our public access, rules, and processes; we are a lot more open.” She said the consensus in 2019 was that “we are good enough as it is; we are… much, much more open or equally comparable to a lot of these other jurisdictions.” Saco said, “Having [email publication] obligatory-open really has a chilling effect on our neighbors who reach out for help on an issue… That is one of the reasons a lot of folks opt out. It’s one of the reasons I opt out.”

Currently, City Commissioners Book, Cynthia Chestnut, and Desmon Duncan-Walker publish their emails. All county commission emails are published, and that board has not indicated that the publication of emails has caused any problems.

Book said he requested the report just to see how Gainesville is doing, compared to peer cities. He asked Bryant if she recommended any changes.

Bryant said JustFOIA has the capability to “have a searchable database of requests. It would cut down a little bit on staff time.”

Eastman said every time they discuss public access, “I am proud of the fact that we have as much transparency – you said it was odd and liberal… I think we’re doing a pretty good job; it’s easy to get lost in the bubble of Gainesville… I’m just struck by how long we’ve been kind of on the bleeding edge of this, and how we continue to be, and I think that’s something we should be proud of.”

“Flipping the switch”

Book brought up “flipping the switch… When somebody makes a public records request, staffers do the research, they provide a link, and they get to download that information. After that, if somebody makes a redundant or close to similar request, it’s the same process, they have to do it again.” He asked about the JustFOIA capability to make previous requests available to anyone.

Bryant said the only real savings would be the elimination of the staff time to process a duplicate request because they already don’t have to go through the research again, once they’ve done it. She added, “Records requests can be very nuanced; it can seem like the same exact request is coming in, but if one or two words are different, it shifts the scope of the request.”

Book said he would like to make previous requests available to the public on the JustFOIA site.

Public comment 

During public comment, Beaty said she has been watching meetings and making public records requests since 2007, “and I can tell you that we’ve become less transparent, less open with citizens being able to participate.” She pointed out that citizens previously had three opportunities for general public comment at meetings; now they have one. She also said she thought the JustFOIA software has “been used to obfuscate and make it harder for people to get emails, to get public records.” She said she read the JustFOIA manual, and the software has more functionality than Gainesville is taking advantage of.

Beaty said commissioners should look back at 2009-2012, “when all of the commission emails were open. You know, you don’t have to do what everybody else is doing. You can set a path, and you were.” She said that a request for emails on a specific topic can cost hundreds of dollars, and if emails were published, she could just search the email portal herself. 

Motion

Following public comment, Saco said that before any motions were made, “I’d like to reiterate… We are in compliance with the Sunshine statutes as we are, so we’ve met the threshold.” She said she preferred keeping the emails unpublished because residents contact them regarding “sensitive subjects.”

Book said that “probably the narrowest scope that may benefit us, from an efficiency standpoint, would be simply allowing public records requests that are made, to then be open, to be searchable, for everyone else… There’s no downside to that that I can understand.”

Book made a motion to “direct staff to enhance City transparency by making previous public records requests open and searchable in our system, and that’s kind of what we call ‘flipping the switch.’ That’s specific to public records requests.” Chestnut seconded the motion. 

Commissioner Casey Willits said it was a little “weird” to him that someone could pay hundreds of dollars for a records search, and then someone else could just look up the result for free. He clarified with Bryant that the emails of GRU Authority members are available as public records and said he was “glad” about that. 

Ward said it’s already the case that if a request has already been fulfilled, it takes less time for the Clerk’s office to fulfill it the next time, so it costs “a whole lot less… So it’s not free, but… certainly reduced.”

The motion passed 4-2, with Saco and Eastman in dissent and Duncan-Walker absent.

Morgan Spicer will be leaving her staff position

After the vote, the commission and charter officers honored Policy Oversight Administrator Morgan Spicer, who Ward said is moving on “to bigger and better things in Hillsborough County.”