Has the city of Little Rock been providing incomplete employee records in response to requests under the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act? City officials can’t be sure, thanks to one department’s unilateral decision to withhold certain records.
That’s according to a memorandum last week from the city attorney to the city’s head of human resources and an email exchange between the city attorney and mayor.
On March 22, City Attorney Tom Carpenter sent a memo to city HR chief Sheridan Richards, raising concerns about how the human resources department was “segregat[ing] personnel files into several different types of files” and “only releas[ing] certain files to this office due to ‘privacy concerns.’” The memo alleges that Richards’ office was withholding “equity scores” contained in employees’ files.
It’s not clear what “equity scores” are or why the city’s HR department was trying to withhold them from FOIA responses. But as Carpenter wrote in his memo, withholding them seems to violate the state transparency law:
Arkansas law allows for the release of public employee records that are that distinct from employee evaluations unless the person was suspended or fired, the discipline is final, the records are relevant, and there is a compelling public interest. The test, as a general rule, is that the records must be disclosed unless doing so would be a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy. Equity scores fall into that classification of releasable information. Hence, it is the position of this office, that equity scores are releasable pursuant to FOIA.
Mayor Frank Scott named Richards, who ran unsuccessfully against City Director Joan Adcock in 2020, as the city’s “Chief People Officer” in July 2023.
Carpenter’s office also forwarded a copy of the memo to the city board and the mayor, who tersely replied, “This employee evaluation privacy issue will be resolved.”
Carpenter quickly responded to Scott’s email, thanking the mayor and elaborating on his concerns. The city attorney’s office is responsible for handling FOIA requests and deciding which records must be released as required by the law.
“[F]or this office to be told by any department that records will not be sent to this office creates grave concerns for the City,” Carpenter wrote Scott. If another department doesn’t provide the city attorney’s office with records, he said, “there is no way to assure that all information which should be redacted prior to release has been properly reviewed[.]”
Aaron Sadler, the city’s communications director, told the Arkansas Times that Richards “was not aware of any issue or a concern from the City Attorney’s office until she received the memo last week.” He said the issue was “immediately corrected” and the mayor had not been aware of what was going on.
Sadler did not answer questions (which the Arkansas Times sent to Scott and Richards) about how the problem began, who authorized the withholding of “equity score” records or why they were withheld.
Asked for comment, Carpenter said he wrote the memo last week to provide greater certainty on the issue. Regardless of the FOIA request, he said, “we cannot honestly respond that records are, or are not, exempt from disclosure unless we actually see them.” Carpenter said he forwarded the memo to Scott and the city board out of “an abundance of caution” since the board “would ultimately be held responsible for nondisclosure.”
This is not the first time that disagreements over what should and shouldn’t be publicly disclosed has caused tensions among Little Rock officials since Scott became mayor.
Scott provided few if any emails in response to multiple FOIA requests during his first six months in office in 2019, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported. In 2021, in response to a FOIA request for applications from people who’d asked through the city website to participate in neighborhood “Scott Strolls,” the mayor said there were no responsive records. This turned out to be false, as a third party disclosed more than 80 applications Scott should have released.
September 2022 saw Carpenter and Scott at odds over the production of documents related to LITfest, the city’s ill-fated attempt to organize a musical festival, as well as Scott’s dishonest claim that no one in his administration had helped ThinkRubix — the company who was to produce LITfest — craft their proposal. Carpenter alleged that a city employee had deleted “numerous emails” regarding LITfest, and he expressed “serious legal concerns” over how the contract was awarded.
Later that year, City Director Capi Peck said Scott had ordered city employees not to release records related to a city development plan created in 2020. Scott refused to answer questions about the issue, declaring he was “not on trial or examination.” (Those records ultimately showed the city had paid a contractor over $49,000 for four slides worth of draft notes.)
In August 2022, the mayor put the city attorney’s office in charge of responding to all city FOIA requests. Before that, the city operated under Scott’s directive that records requests should be routed through his office.