City Auditor Gary Blackmer and City Attorney Linda Meng struck a blow for transparency in council this morning, recommending that the city adopt tighter policies over electronic data, and invest in a new computer records system so that it is more easily able to comply with public records requests.

TRANSPARENCY POLICE: MENG, center, with BLACKMER, on her left.

Right now, the Bureau of Technology Services (BTS) backs up all the city's electronic data—emails, spreadsheets, police records, and so on—but it doesn't have a system with which it can easily search those backups. And the backups alone don't necessarily comply with existing state public records law, let alone more stringent laws currently being proposed by Secretary of State Kate Brown, according to Blackmer.

Instead, Meng and Blackmer are proposing that the city tighten its policies over electronic records, and expand its new active electronic records management system—which has been on trial at the police bureau since January 2007, and is better equipped to find proverbial needles in the hay stack of electronic data. Right now, if all of BTS's data were printed out on paper, it would require 2 million trees, and create a stack of papers 440 miles high, for example.

This is great news. In the past, for example, the Mercury has balked at the expensive cost of obtaining public records from the city—because of the cost of BTS going through the haystack to find the record it may need.

"You've got to understand that a lot of people will make requests and then when they get the price tag, will not follow through," said Blackmer. "And that's another thing that the courts are getting less tolerant of."

But one valuable thing I did learn at this morning's session: The law states, currently, that the city is supposed to waive the cost of processing such requests made by journalists if the information is in the public interest. In future I'll be writing "I am requesting that you waive the fee, as has been city practice in the past, because this information is in the public interest," on all my public records request letters. And hopefully, I'll actually get hold of some of the information we're requesting on your behalf—regardless of this new system proposed by Blackmer!

The city receives dozens of such requests daily from attorneys, the public, and of course, the press. City Commissioner Nick Fish also requested that the city auditor's office and the city attorney's office start keeping a list of all the public records requests made of the city, and distribute it to commissioners once a week. "So that we can do our due diligence in case we have a dog in that fight," Fish said. Such a list would also be enormously helpful to journalists tracking city business. We'll have to lodge a public records request for a copy.