Court rulings on public access to job applications • Iowa Capital Dispatch

The Iowa Supreme Court has ruled that the city of Cedar Rapids must disclose job applications from current employees.

The city of Cedar Rapids hired a new city clerk in 2021, promoting longtime city employee Alissa Van Sloten to the position. She also applied for the vacant city attorney position from Elizabeth Jacobi, then an assistant city attorney in Cedar Rapids, and Vanessa Chavez, then a city attorney in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Ultimately, the city decided to hire Chavez.

Citizen Robert Teig then filed public records applications for job applications and several other documents related to the city’s hiring process. The city refused to comply with many of Teig’s requests, citing attorney-client privilege in some cases and also arguing that confidentiality provisions in the Open Records Act exempted several documents from disclosure.

Teig filed suit, and in May 2023, a district court judge granted the city’s motion for a default judgment, ruling that all employment applications are confidential. The district court ruled that job applications could not be disclosed both as “confidential personnel records” and as communications from “non-government” persons.

Teig appealed that finding to the Iowa Supreme Court, arguing in part that job applications submitted to government agencies are not confidential under the law and that municipalities cannot invoke attorney-client privilege in the context of Open Records Act requests.

Last week, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that the district court was correct in finding that documents purportedly covered by the attorney-client privilege are protected from disclosure under Iowa law even in the context of public access disputes.

When asked whether job applications were protected from public disclosure, the court found that only messages from people “outside the administration” were protected – therefore the city was obliged to disclose applications submitted by then city employees.

“Communications between current, but not prospective, employees and the governmental body that employs them, including applications for a new position with the hiring body, are not conducted by persons ‘outside the government,’” the Iowa Supreme Court has ruled.

The court also found that the district court failed to grant Teiga’s separate claims for unreasonable delays in producing billing documentation on the basis that the documentation was ultimately obtained through other means. “The fact that a document was ultimately obtained from another source does not necessarily invalidate a claim of unreasonable delay,” the Iowa Supreme Court ruled.

The Court leaves the issue of fees to legislators

As part of his case, Teig also challenged fees charged by the city for access to public information. In its ruling, the court said the validity of such fees was best left to the Iowa Legislature.

The Court noted that while fees “may actually impede access to public records,” they “can also ensure continued access to public records through increased funding and deterring excessive or overly broad requests. In any case, it is up to the General Assembly to consider these political interests.”

The Iowa Freedom of Information Council and the ACLU of Iowa intervened in the case by filing an amicus brief focusing specifically on the issue of government agencies charging fees to provide public access to records collected and archived at taxpayer expense.

The board noted that Cedar Rapids charges a fee of $20 per hour to retrieve requested records, copy them and supervise their examination. The organizations noted that the city also charges the same hourly rate for any other “necessary” actions taken to make public records available to the public.

“We are concerned that judges have missed this opportunity to stop the increase in search and retrieval fees,” said Randy Evans, executive director of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council. “The rising costs of collecting documentation are the greatest obstacle to public access to documentation. The Iowa FOI Council hopes that next year the Legislature will adopt the Supreme Court’s call to address the obstacles that unreasonable search and retrieval fees create for people trying to monitor the activities of state and local governments.”

In its court filings, the board noted that in 2021, the Iowa Capital Dispatch sought access to two months of emails between the state’s then-chief medical officer, Dr. Caitlin Pedati, and federal officials whose offer to help control the spread of the state’s Covid virus -19 in Iowa meatpacking plants was rejected by the state. The state declined to consider releasing these emails without paying an advance payment of $9,893 to offset the costs of retrieving and later reviewing the emails.

Capital Dispatch rejected the offer, noting that payment of such a fee did not guarantee disclosure. The news organization could have paid the full $9,893 and still been denied access to all emails.

“The cost of email recovery puts important information out of reach of the Iowa Capital Dispatch and its readers,” the Iowa Freedom of Information Council told the court in an amicus brief. “The real-world consequences of these recovery costs deprived citizens hungry for statistical information and the strategies and possible solutions that the federal government’s top experts were offering to Iowa.”

Because last week’s ruling upholds some of the district court’s earlier ruling and reverses others, the case has been remanded to the district court for further proceedings consistent with the Supreme Court’s findings.