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The Iowa Supreme Court has ruled that the City of Cedar Rapids must disclose job applications received from current employees.
In 2021, the City of Cedar Rapids hired a new city clerk by promoting longtime city employee Alissa Van Sloten to the position. It also fielded applications for the vacant city attorney’s position from Elizabeth Jacobi, then an assistant city attorney for Cedar Rapids, and Vanessa Chavez, then the city attorney for Green Bay, Wis. The city ultimately decided to hire Chavez.
A citizen, Robert Teig, then submitted public-records requests for job applications and several other documents related to the city’s hiring process. The city refused to fulfill many of Teig’s requests, claiming attorney-client privilege in some instances, and also alleging that the confidentiality provisions of the Open Records Law exempted several documents from disclosure.
Teig sued, and in May 2023 a district court judge granted the city’s motion for summary judgment, declaring that all employment applications were confidential. The district court ruled that job applications can be withheld from disclosure as both “confidential personnel records” and as communications from individuals “outside of government.”
Teig appealed that finding to the Iowa Supreme Court, arguing in part that job applications submitted to governmental bodies are not confidential under the law, and that municipalities cannot claim attorney-client privilege in the context of Open Records Law requests.
Last week, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled the district court had correctly found that documents claimed to be covered by attorney-client privilege were protected from disclosure under Iowa law even in the context of public-access disputes.
On the question of whether job applications were protected from public disclosure, the court found that such protection is extended only to communications from people “outside of government” – and so the city was obligated to disclose applications submitted by then-current employees of the city.
“Communications between current — but not prospective — employees and the governmental body that employs them, including applications for a new position with the employing body, are not made by persons ‘outside of government,’” the Iowa Supreme Court ruled.
The court also found that the district court had failed to address Teig’s separate claims of unwarranted delays in producing billing records on the grounds that the records were eventually obtained through other means. “That a document is eventually received from another source does not necessarily moot a claim of unreasonable delay,” the Iowa Supreme Court ruled.
Court leaves fee issue to legislators
As part of his case, Teig had also challenged the fees charged by the city for gaining access to public information. In its ruling, the court said the reasonableness of such fees is a matter best left to the Iowa Legislature.
The court observed that while fees “may in fact hamper access to public documents,” they “may also ensure continuing access to public records through increased funding and deterring excessive or overly broad requests. In any event, weighing these policy interests is for the general assembly.”
The Iowa Freedom of Information Council and the ACLU of Iowa had intervened in the case, filing an amicus brief that focused specifically on the issue of government agencies charging fees to provide public access to records that are collected and archived at taxpayers’ expense.
The council noted that Cedar Rapids charges $20 per hour to retrieve requested records, copy the records, and supervise their examination. The same hourly fee is also imposed by the city for any other “necessary” activities that are undertaken to make public records accessible to the public, the organizations noted.
“We are concerned the justices did not take this opportunity to rein in the growth of fees for search and retrieval of records,” said Randy Evans, executive director of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council. “The rising costs for gathering records is the single biggest roadblock to the public’s access to records. The Iowa FOI Council hopes the Legislature next year will take the Supreme Court up on its invitation to address the impediments that unreasonable search and retrieval fees create for people trying to monitor their state and local governments’ actions.”
In its court filings, the council noted that in 2021, the Iowa Capital Dispatch sought access to two months’ worth of emails between the state’s then-medical director, Dr. Caitlin Pedati, and the federal officials whose offer of assistance in controlling the spread of COVID-19 in Iowa’s meatpacking plants was rejected by the state. The state refused to consider disclosure of those emails without an advance payment of a $9,893 fee to offset the cost of retrieving and then reviewing the emails.
The Capital Dispatch rejected the offer, noting that payment of such a fee wouldn’t guarantee disclosure. The news organization could have paid the full $9,893 and still been denied access to all of the emails.
“The cost of retrieving the emails put important information out of the reach of Iowa Capital Dispatch and its readers,” the Iowa Freedom of Information Council told the court in its amicus brief. “The real-world consequence of these retrieval costs deprived citizens who were hungering for information of statistics and strategies and possible solutions the federal government’s top experts were offering to Iowa.”
Because last week’s ruling affirms part of the district court’s prior ruling, and reverses other parts, the case had been remanded back to district court for further proceedings consistent with the Supreme Court’s findings.
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