RICHMOND, Va. -- Some Richmond residents say they're still experiencing headaches trying to get information and public records from the city, even after City Hall was recently criticized for failing to comply with open records laws.
Kevin Cianfarini and Jessee Perry are two different citizens with one common issue: They say their government ignored them.
“Just the level of transparency here is not where it needs to be," said Cianfarini. "We're being stonewalled."
"It definitely seems like there’s a systematic transparency problem," Perry said. “Richmond is just not responding.”
They both submitted requests to access city records.
It's a right guaranteed to every citizen under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which requires the government to be transparent about the work it does on behalf of taxpayers.
“At the end of the day, these are our taxpayer dollars, and we have a right to know where they're being spent and how they're being spent," Perry said.
The law states all public bodies must respond to FOIA requests within five days.
But according to emails Cianfarini and Perry provided to CBS 6, the city violated FOIA by not meeting that deadline.
“Our city officials are not abiding by state law for FOIA, and we need to start enforcing that, and that needs to be a culture grown from the inside out," Cianfarini said.
Cianfarini is an advocate with the Sierra Club and the group Beyond Methane. He works to combat climate change and also tracks gas leaks across the city.
On January 18, Cianfarini filed a request for the Department of Public Utilities regarding the spending of bond money and planned expenditures on natural gas infrastructure.
"Rates with utilities have been going up. They've been going up for years. There's a lot of factors for that," Cianfarini said. “We're trying to understand why they're going up and how we might be able to stop that to some degree. And in doing so, we need to understand some pretty nuanced details of how the Department of Public Utilities operates.”
But fast forward to April, and he said his request remained unfulfilled, meaning the city was ten weeks late.
Then there's Jessee Perry, a local blogger of city politics.
She submitted requests to Richmond, Henrico, Hanover, and Chesterfield asking for information about FOIA logs and costs.
Richmond did not respond within the legal deadline, but all the other localities did.
“They were trying to be very cooperative, prompt, on time, very respectful, very helpful— compared to just the absolute silence from Richmond City," Perry said.
Perry and Cianfarini's concerns come after a CBS 6 investigation in February revealed a pattern of FOIA noncompliance in Richmond. Internal emails obtained by CBS 6 showed City Hall leaders were unresponsive to the city's former FOIA officer Connie Clay, who was asking for necessary information from them to fulfill requests.
Clay was fired on January 19.
In March, Connie filed a lawsuit against the city, alleging she was wrongfully fired after blowing the whistle about ongoing and intentional FOIA violations.
“There were many instances where I was asked to withhold information that should have been released or to sit on records that should have been released," Clay previously told CBS 6 in an interview.
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Perry, who submitted her FOIA request after the news broke about the FOIA complaints, was surprised to see issues persist.
“The fact that this is still going on, especially after all these things that have come to light, it's egregious, honestly," Perry said.
In an internal memo by Richmond's Chief Administrative Officer Lincoln Saunders, dated shortly after CBS 6's reporting and Clay's lawsuit, he said the city would be working to implement several changes to the FOIA process.
Most notably, Saunders said the city would decentralize its FOIA system, allowing individual city department to handle its requests and establish updated standard operating procedures.
However, Cianfarini and Perry said they haven't noticed the improvements yet.
“I think being somebody who wants to be involved locally, who wants to help the city be better, it's hard to do that when the city's either willfully or not willfully being transparent," Cianfarini said.
"Just get it together. It's something that's basic government functioning. It shouldn't be that difficult to get this information for people," Perry said.
A spokesperson told CBS 6 that the city is working on both Perry and Cianfarini's FOIA requests. She said it's possible that they got caught up during a transitional period or missed in emails that never came through.
On April 3, responsive records were sent to Cianfarini regarding his request. Cianfarini disputed the completeness of the response and received a call from DPU Director April Bingham shortly after. Cianfarini said Bingham told him someone is still working on his request and would have it fulfilled next week.
On April 3, Perry was notified that a FOIA officer would deliver her records by April 8.
Moving forward, the city is establishing a new tracker to keep a record of incoming requests, the costs associated with each request, the timeline for fulfilling each request, and the documents responsive to each request.
A spokesperson said city employees charged with handling FOIA requests are going through training, and the city attorney's office is providing assistance to those who need it.
She estimates the city's compliance with FOIA has improved over the past couple of months and is asking for a little more time before getting to "100%."
She said the city is committed to transparency.
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