The city has not fulfilled a Tulsa World request submitted more than a month ago for emails that could settle questions over how much Mayor Dewey Bartlett and his administration knew about problems in the city's green-waste program.
The newspaper filed the request Aug. 12 under the state's Open Records Act for emails containing the phrase "green waste" sent or received in the last year by six city officials, including Bartlett, City Manager Jim Twombly and the city's lead trash managers.
City spokeswoman Michelle Allen said in a statement this week that the request involves about 2,500 emails and attachments and that the city's Legal Department must review each of them "for compliance (with the Open Records Act) and appropriate content to fulfilling the request."
The World reported last month that yard waste picked up at residents' curbs has been taken exclusively to the city's trash incinerator along with the garbage almost since the beginning of the new trash system because equipment at the green-waste mulching plant could not remove the clear plastic bags in which residents are asked to place the material.
Residents, meanwhile, were still required to affix those bags with 50-cent green waste stickers and also paid a monthly fee for the service.
Questions about who in Bartlett's administration knew about the problem - and who, if anyone, was responsible for failing to inform residents - have lingered since then.
Former Mayor Kathy Taylor, who is challenging Bartlett in the November election, and several city councilors have publicly questioned the mayor's claim that he was never told.
Councilor G.T. Bynum said this week that he would be interested in seeing the emails because they might answer one of his most pressing questions: "How high did knowledge of it go?"
Twombly has said he knew of the problem early on but didn't tell Bartlett, and Bartlett said he would not have expected Twombly to do so.
Bartlett said this week that questions about green waste "have been asked and answered repeatedly" and that they seem to serve only "to give the press something to talk about."
The open records response, he said, is a different issue.
Emails must be checked manually before being released because "we have a responsibility to the public to give the correct information and not disclose info that is personal in nature," he said.
Joey Senat, an associate professor of media law at Oklahoma State University, said he believes that having attorneys review records after they are compiled by someone else is illegal because the act requires public bodies to designate someone who can release records "at all times" during business hours.
That designee should be familiar enough with the law to provide records directly to the person who asks for them, Senat said.
He pointed to comments by former Attorney General Drew Edmondson, who told The Oklahoman in 2006 that filtering an open records request through an attorney might violate the Open Records Act's requirement for public bodies to provide "prompt and reasonable" access to records.
"The law's pretty clear, and what the AG has said is that public agencies have a duty to provide records in the time it takes to locate and compile the records," Senat said.
In Tulsa "they're adding an extra step that would appear to be unnecessary."
Zack Stoycoff 918-581-8486
zack.stoycoff@tulsaworld.com
Original Print Headline: City still withholding green-waste emails
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The convenience store chain was the sole distributor of the 50-cent stickers residents were required to place on bags of extra yard waste.
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