Where are the calls?

Today, we are going to talk about public records. This will be the 2nd part of my conversation from last week.

If you recall, County Administrator Steve Howard has been asked in a public records request to provide phone call records of calls that he has made related to his work.

The request is pretty clear. Public records laws require the release of call logs for calls that are in the transaction of official business. In this case, these call logs would be for calls related to Citrus County and his job as administrator.

These logs would not include personal calls, although he could provide those if desired. The assumption, maybe incorrectly, is that all the calls he provided are related to county business.

I received around 12oo calls over the 2 month period I asked about.

I noticed that many of these calls were to the personal devices of county staff, so I did a records request for those individuals and their personal devices. Here is the request to Eric Landon... and yes, I messed up the phone number in the copy/paste of the emails and forgot to change it out, so ignore the first line.

Before I go further, I am keeping his phone number on this page and not blacking it out. Why? Well it is now public record due to the email and Howard's disclosure to me. Secondly, you can Google his name and get this number.

That email was sent to about 6 individuals. To date, I have received responses from County Attorney Denise Lyn and yesterday, Eric Landon. None of the others have even responded to my email... the law requires prompt acknowledgement of the request, which has not been done.. And one of the individuals tried to argue with me that their device does not keep a log, therefore, they are not required to give me anything as that would create a new record.

Also wrong... But I digress.

Landon sent me his response yesterday.

Those 14 phone calls are to Howard's county device. Ok, all good, right?

Well no. First, 5 calls are missing. Howard's county device call logs show 19 phone calls with Landon, not 14. These are the ones missing:

• April 22 at 9:13am for 1 minute
• May 14 at 9:45am for 1 minute
• May 21 at 8:00am for 1 minute
• May 21 at 10:04am for 1 minute
• May 26 at 9:50am for 1 minute

Ok, not a huge deal I suppose. 5 calls should have been listed that weren't, but I already had them.

More concerning. According to the call logs I received from Howard, he had 140 calls with Landon on his personal device.

Why were these calls not included in Landon's records disclosure? Did he consider them personal in nature and therefore, not subject to disclosure? I emailed him to ask, but have not received a response.

Here is a sample of those calls. The yellow is the county call log from Howard's county device. The white/blue are Howard's personal phone records.

A lot of those calls take place during business hours, where employees are presumably working.

I would think that Landon would include these calls if he thought they were public record. The fact that they are to/from Howard's personal device does not exempt them from disclosure if the topic of the call were related to his job in the county.

So it is either confusion on what is public record or he does not classify these calls as related to county business and they are personal in nature... To be fair, Howard did not specifically state those calls were county related calls. He provided them for that request, but he could have provided personal calls.

However... that is a lot of calls on county time that would be personal in nature. I think it is safe to assume those are county related calls.

So questions abound.

1) Is Landon confused on what is public record and did not think calls to/from Howard's personal device are public record... despite him fulfilling the call log request for his own personal device?

2) Are the calls discussions of county business or are they personal in nature and therefore, not subject to records disclosure? If they were private... there are a lot of personal phone calls on the tax payer's time.

3) If they were discussing county business, did Landon intentionally violate public records laws by not providing the requested records? If he knew they were public record, as he should based on the request of him to provide the same thing, why would he not disclose those calls to begin with?

4) If these were related to county business and not disclosed, are there other calls that were also not disclosed as well?

5) Did Howard tell him that he already provided his call logs, so Landon thought that since I already had them from, he did not have to disclose any of them... despite giving me the calls to the Howard's county device.

Something is not adding up.

I find all of this interesting, but my real problem is not Landon's calls. It is Howard putting him (and the others) in this position to begin with for calling their personal devices. They all have county devices. He should be calling on those devices for county related calls. If those are not county related calls, both of them talk about personal things on county time an awful lot.

Howard making these calls puts an undue burden on the staff members he is calling. Now all of them are subject to disclosure (although they already are). Now they have to look at their call logs and determine what is personal and what is county business. Maybe they think about that a bit because they wonder if their boss want those calls disclosed? Is there fear of repercussion if they disclose those calls? Does he want people to know he is calling their personal devices?

See how that can create an issue for staffers and put them in a bad spot.

If those calls were related to county business, Landon should have disclosed them. Since he did not, he is in violation of public records laws.

If those calls were personal, he is having a lot of personal conversations with Howard during county operating hours.

Bad look either way, right?... but one that could have been avoided had Howard not made the calls to Landon's personal device to begin with.