Pretty much everyone has heard the saying (often misattributed to Bismarck but more likely said first by John Godfrey Saxe) about the making of sausage and laws... Namely: that to maintain one’s respect for either, one must avoid seeing how they get made.
That saying seems to apply several times over to the records this site obtained recently via Freedom of Information Law request from the City of Hudson, regarding the 2011-2012 citywide reval of property tax assessments. Here’s another illuminating exchange between Common Council President Don Moore and GAR Associates’ David Bartlett:
In early March of this year, Moore emailed Barnett to ask for a spreadsheet of Hudson property assessments in Excel format, since he was having some trouble with the PDF version. Barnett replies promptly with the Excel version attached, and adds this eyebrow-raising note:
Please do not disclose that this is in your possession. In past projects, spreadsheet numbers have been manipulated and used to paint an inaccurate picture. All of which I know you know.
Moore does not challenge or acknowledge Barnett’s curious request, merely thanking him for the file and asking for another.
Since the data had been made available as a PDF on the City’s website, one naturally wonders why Barnett would caution Moore to “not disclose” its existence as a spreadsheet.
The likely answer is technical, but important to explain... PDFs can be scanned or locked to make it difficult for recipients to export the document’s contents into other programs. With the raw data in hand, a recipient could more readily search, sort and analyze the material in much greater depth. One can compute averages, medians, modes, and changes, or segment results by property class, neighborhood, etc.
So from a citizen’s perspective, it appears that Barnett is concerned someone might use the underlying data behind the assessments to—heavens!—actually check GAR’s work. He’s telegraphing to Moore: “Don't let people know you have this data in this format, because then they can come up with their own conclusions, and maybe challenge ours.”
Tellingly, Barnett seems to assume that any independent analysis would be “manipulated” and “inaccurate,” rather than validating their work. From this, one might add a corollary to the Bismarck/Saxe law: that when selling sausage, it's best not to disclose the ingredients.
POSTSCRIPT: For those interested in the details New York’s Freedom of Information Law, there are a couple of more wrinkles to consider here.
First off, it has been affirmed by State law and well-established in court—for example, in a recent case brought successfully by The New York Times against New York City—that if a government agency has a record in electronic format, the public is entitled to receive copies of that record in its original form.
For example, if a Mayor’s prepared a press release on his computer in Microsoft Word, sent it to his assistant via email, and attached a database of people two whom he wanted it sent, one would entitled to get those three documents in their “native” formats (Word, email, DBF). It would be improper for the agency to reply to the requests by printing them out and scanning them, as important data and capabilities may be lost in that process.
This might seem like picayune stuff, but for reporters and researchers it isn’t trivial at all; it goes to the heart of whether the press and public can hold their leaders accountable by delving into the making of their sausage.
A more pertinent example: Say a newspaper were doing an investigative report on whether a big city police department were profiling residents by race or neighborhood, and requested several years of arrest records in electronic format to prove or debunk such allegations.
If printed, such records could make up hundreds or thousands of pages, at 25 cents per page; whereas in their electronic format they might be sent as relatively small data files. More importantly, if these records are not provided in their original “native” format, the paper would either be stymied in its intent to do a statistical analysis, or else would have to spend a lot of time and money to have someone re-enter the data by hand into a searchable, sortable format.
In short, by not providing records in their original electronic formats when they exist as such, government can hide a lot of truths from the public, or at least make it much more difficult to arrive at those truths.
Predictably, Hudson’s City Attorney, Cheryl Roberts got snippy when these legal considerations were called to her attention, considerations I’d verified first with the indispensable Bob Freeman of the NYS Committee on Open Government. The City’s response to my FOIL came not in their original, native formats, but as scans of newly-made printouts, making them difficult to search, sort and analyze. (Unfortunately for them, I found software which pretty accurately scanned their materials back into searchable form, though no citizen or news outlet should have to go to that trouble.)
The City’s FOIL policy as it stands is to play dumb, drag out the time for responding, segment the process among its various departments, create unnecessary work for the City Clerk by having her scan printouts of electronic records—and then act annoyed when it’s pointed out that this has made things unnecessarily slow, wasteful and irritating for everyone involved.
A second wrinkle is that Barnett’s warning to Don Moore would not likely hold up in court, even if GAR had withheld the database file from the Council President. As a consultant to several government agencies (here, the Assessor’s Office, Mayor’s Office, and Common Council), GAR’s work product would likely be deemed a public record subject to FOIL.
Anyway, there’s still more to come from the GAR files.
