On May 4, my colleague Zen Ruryk and I put in a municipal freedom of information (FOI) request to access the 2006 office expense records of the mayor and the 12 councillors on his handpicked executive committee. We decided to seek the records after perennial council big spender Giorgio Mammoliti put forward what struck me, at least, as a series of petty, almost childish, motions calling for a review of council penny-pinchers Doug Holyday and Rob Ford, for spending too little of their $53,100 annual office budgets. Mayor David Miller and his loyal socialist soldiers approved the motions at the April 30 executive committee meeting and had a majority of votes to get them passed at the full council meeting in May. I found it hard to believe the mayor of a city in fiscal crisis would waste precious time and resources on such nonsense. Still, since he and his followers had opened this can of worms Ruryk and I decided to take a closer look at how they spend their $53,100 ... er ... office budgets. So, on May 4 we paid our $5 fee to the city's corporate access and privacy office -- and waited. And waited. Despite what's supposed to be 30-day turnaround time under the legislation, we finally gained access to the records we requested Monday, July 23, nearly 12 weeks after we'd filed our original letter. We weren't surprised -- having often joked that the corporate access and privacy office seems to be more about inaccess than getting information that should be freely available to the media and public. $4,000 charge The initial flurry of calls came in mid-May from the access and privacy officer assigned to our file. He said there were thousands of documents to access (5,764 pages filling two boxes) and it would cost us $4,000 to view them. He was counting on having to spend the time severing (that is, blanking out personal details like credit card numbers) for many of those documents. When the scary price-tag didn't deter us, he tried to convince us to narrow our request to just a few councillors. A series of negotiations ensued, but it wasn't until I indicated I might do a column on the huge cost of our request, along with what seemed like other obstacles being thrown in our way, that there was some movement. Suddenly we were told the fees wouldn't be as high -- we ended up paying $226 to sever the records and another $180 in photocopying fees. On May 29, Ruryk and I were invited to view a sampling of 200 pages with the assurance our request would be completed shortly after I returned from a trip to Israel in mid-June. That turned into the end of July. Like Ford, who went through a similar ordeal in 2003 when he tried to view his colleagues' office expense records, I don't believe one should even have to use FOI legislation to access such information. In Ford's case, when he asked to view the files in city's council services office, he was given what he says was a "hard time" and then the information was doled out one file at a time. He was charged 25 cents for every photocopy he requested and ended up handing over $500 to the office for copies of the records. Security watching "They had security at the door watching me ... I couldn't leave the room with any files," he said. Both Ford and Holyday intend to put forward a motion at the September council meeting asking that every single expense receipt -- like the ones we accessed -- be put on the city's web site. "If everything is above board, they'd show every single receipt," says Ford. "It's ridiculous," added Holyday, the city's audit committee chairman, yesterday. "That's tax dollars ... that kind of information should be readily available." sue-ann.levy@sunmedia.ca |
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