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Judge fines Mason County over records

By Christian Hill | The Olympian • Published April 03, 2009

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A judge has penalized Mason County $145,000 in fines and legal costs for its failure to comply with a resident's records requests.

Thurston County Superior Court Judge Gary Tabor ruled in October after a bench trial that the county violated state law when it didn't produce public documents requested by Tahuya resident Harold Carey.

The fines imposed by Tabor last week included an unprecedented daily penalty of $100 for withholding some of the undisclosed documents. That's the maximum fine allowed under state law, said attorney Greg Overstreet, whose law firm, Allied Law Group, represented Carey.

"I've never heard of it being awarded in any other case, and I actually keep track of these things," said Overstreet, a former open-government ombudsman for the state Attorney General's Office. His law firm also represents The Olympian.

Money from the fines will go to Carey and his attorneys. The county's insurance pool will pay the costs.

Mason County settled a different public-records complaint filed by Carey's son, Brad, for $175,000 last year.

The case stems from four e-mails Carey sent the county in January and May 2006 requesting two documents related to a highway-corrector project and sewer systems. The county never responded. Carey first talked to the public-records officer for the county in January 2007, nearly a year after he submitted his first requests. After receiving no response to a fifth e-mailed request for public records sent shortly after that conversation, he sued the county the following month.

Mason County argued at trial that the public-records officer, Becky Rogers, never responded because the e-mails ended up in her junk e-mail file, not her inbox. The county's lawyer theorized that Carey's first e-mail request was included in a large group of spam e-mail she moved into the junk file, blocking future e-mails from the same addresses to prevent them from clogging her inbox.

Carey's attorneys argued that his case illustrates systematic problems within the county government in complying with the state's public-records act, including not having any protocol for responding to records requests.