(The Center Square) – A Seattle political commentator secured a victory Monday in a public records case against the city of Seattle.
The Citizen Action Defense Fund (CADF) brought the case on behalf of unDivided Media, LLC podcaster Brandi Kruse, over the city’s failure to properly comply with public records requests in 2024.
“The appellate court’s ruling affirms that government agencies cannot evade their obligations under the Public Records Act (PRA), reinforcing the principle that transparency is not optional,” noted a news release from CADF.
“Brandi was covering the Seattle City Council meeting when the council was going to take a really controversial vote on whether to criminalize drug offenses within the city,” said CADF Executive Director and Counsel Jackson Maynard. “There was a lot of opposition, and one of the primary folks who had indicated he was going to vote in favor of this measure, and then at the last minute changed his vote was former council member Andrew Lewis.”
City taxpayers may have to pay Kruse’s legal fees but it was not clear how much that may be.
Maynard explained that Kruse put in a records request to find out what was behind Lewis’s last-minute change up on the issue, but the city delayed supplying requested documents.
“She just asked for any emails he had received on his public computer, public email account, and cell phone for any text messages he had received,” Jackson said. “She just wanted to see who was contacting him.”
The city responded via email to tell Kruse the first installment of documents would be available after August, which was after the primary in which the council member was running.
“And then probably most troubling, the second installment was not going to be available until mid-November, after the general election, in which the former council member was going to be running,” he said.
Maynard explained that in depositions, they learned the city failed to follow its own policies in how it had handled Kruse’s request, and yet a lower court still ruled against them.
“CADF appealed after that lower court’s ruling, arguing that the City’s conduct undermined both the letter and spirit of Washington’s transparency laws,” wrote CADF in the news release.
The appellate court unanimously agreed on Monday, and Maynard says the decision is a major step forward in government transparency and accountability.
“The public being able to know what their government is doing and why they’re making the decisions they’re making and who’s influencing them, that’s all so crucial to ensure that the government is acting in the people’s interests and that the decisions that they’re making are for the good of the people and not due to other special interests or political considerations that don’t have the best interests of people at heart,” he said.
Kruse wrote that she hopes the ruling will encourage the new administration to comply with state open records laws.
“The city has lost or settled quite a few public records suits in recent years,” Kruse wrote in a statement to The Center Square. “To be fair, current leadership at the Mayor’s Office and City Attorney’s Office was not in place when the violations in this case occurred. I am hopeful that new leadership is learning lessons from past mistakes in order to keep government transparent and accountable for all.”
City officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
