Groups Sue Governor's Office Over Lack Of Transparency

On Friday, an Oklahoma County judge denied a summary judgment request by both a local non-profit and a local newspaper in their attempt to get the Oklahoma Governor’s office to fulfill their Open Records request, which was made in the summer of 2014.

The first one, A Perfect Cause, was asking the Governor's office for records pertaining to state nursing homes and their providers, as well as correspondence involving seven state officials.

The other group, The Oklahoma Observer, requested records about the executions of two Oklahoma inmates.

But Friday, neither entity received any documents to review.

A lawsuit was filed in November 2015 and then in November of 2016, a request for summary judgment was entered. Friday both sides pleaded their case.

The governor's office filed a 52-page response stating they have no deadline to meet those requests, and that there are other requests ahead of them.

At this point, it looks like this civil case is headed to trial.

News 9 caught up with Wes Bledsoe, the founder of A Perfect Cause, outside the courtroom following Friday morning’s hearing.

“The Governor's office says there's 8GB of data, and that our request was over reaching, and that they just haven't had enough time to go through all that data,” said Bledsoe.

“When you have somebody saying I want to see public records, and you don't have the capability to start searching for those for two and a half years, that's a big problem,” said Brady Henderson who is an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union.

Henderson is representing the two entities involved in the lawsuit.

The Governor's office issued their legal response back in January, objecting to the motion for summary judgment requested by the plaintiffs.

The response stated the document requests should be more "narrowly tailored" and that the "Oklahoma Open Records Act contains no specific deadline or number of days within which all Open Records request must be fulfilled".

Though the motion for summary judgment was denied by the presiding judge, he did set a pretrial hearing of July 26 for the case, which could provide a date for a trial in this case.

“And I think this case if it does go to trial will give us a lot of information to figure out what is really going on behind those closed doors,” said Henderson. “You know we have a Governor who has twice been given the black hole award by freedom of information Oklahoma indicating the very opposite of government transparency.”

Friday evening Governor Mary Fallin released the following statement:

“I believe in transparency and the open records process for the public. The sheer volume of requested documents over the last six years to pull to be reviewed and processed overwhelmed our system. Despite this fact, I have released more than 300,000 pages of records, which is more than all the previous governors combined.

To deal with the huge volumes of requests and documents to produce, I have partnered with the staff from the state attorney general’s office to assist my office with its open records request. Documents must be legally reviewed to comply with the law on not releasing certain confidential records, such as the name of a minor child who is the victim of sexual assault.

Last fall, I instituted a better process which gives the governor’s office the ability to quickly fulfill smaller document requests that do not require a review of multiple years and thousands of documents. Since Oct. 7, 2016, the governor’s office has fulfilled 19 of these types of requests.

Since the date of the plaintiff’s request in this particular case, the governor’s office has released more than 200,000 open records.”