Category Archives: Tech

Why not free public access to court records?

6 Replies

Here’s an interesting comment left by a regular reader on Friday’s post regarding access to court records filed in digital form.

Mahalo Ian! I’m curious what the reasoning is for the truly “free” documents to only be available by adding some effort and pain to getting them…ie. having to use the courthouse terminals, or with the other suggested method…having to go to a Library to get access. Is the reasoning that there is the potential for abuse of the information if someone could access files from eCourt Kokua at home?

When I first read the comment, I started to write a reply explaining that the law allows agencies to recoup some of the cost of making copyies. Although I believe agencies can charge at little at 5 cents per page, many charge much more. I think court rules still list copy fees of $1 for the first page, and 50 cents for each additonal page, obviously far beyond the actual cost of copying.

Of course, all of this comes from the age of paper documents. Take the court records. The original documents stored at the courts where they had been filed, and it was reasonable for the public to be required to go to one of those locations to look at or request copies.

That’s why my first reaction is relief at how much easier it is to access many public records than it used to be, especially those needed for public oversight of government agencies. It’s far better than it used to be. And, to tell you the truth this sometimes that clouds my own vision.

Could easier access to court records become free public access in the future? I doubt there is any technical issue at all. The question, as it often is, comes down to money.

Here’s what Hawaii’s public records law says, in brief:

§92F-11 Affirmative agency disclosure responsibilities. (a) All government records are open to public inspection unless access is restricted or closed by law.

(b) Except as provided in section 92F-13, each agency upon request by any person shall make government records available for inspection and copying during regular business hours.

When I worked at the old Honolulu Star-Bulletin back in the 1990s, there were a couple of large projects that required reviewing large batches of public records. When an agency demanded an exorbitant amount for making copies, the newspaper arranged to move its own copy machine in and reporters made the copies themselves at a much lower cost.

Here’s what the law now provides regarding copying and costs.

This has, in large part, been made obsolete for many, perhaps most purposes, by the appearance of smart phones that make scanning documents fast, inexpensive, and unobtrusive. As long as a document is made available for inspection, it can be easily scanned with a phone. So much for copying costs. I recall a period where there was agency pushback against the technology, with attempt to ban use of phones to scan documents. However, that proved to be impossible as well as likely contrary to law.

You can imagine the conversation. “Is that a phone? No phones are allowed in the document room.”
“Oh, no. It’s not a phone. It’s a portable scanner. I don’t believe there’s any rule against that.
“Well, okay, but no photos are allowed.”
“Righto, just scans. No worries.”

Back to the question of public access to court documents via the Judiciary Electronic Filing and Service System (JEFS).

I haven’t been able to locate enough information about the financial aspects of the system to be able to say what role per-page copy fees and subscriptions play in keeping the whole system running.

However, from the outside, it appears that the primary purposes of the system of filing and retrieving documents in digital form is to keep the court system itself running efficiently without being buried in paper. The primary beneficiary of the system are the courts, judges, and attorneys, while the public benefits first of all from added efficiencies and, in the long run, substantial cost savings.

Anyone familiar with the public documents room in Honolulu’s First Circuit Court knows that before transitioning to a fully online system, the amount of incoming paper far exceeded the ability to process it or the capacity to store it. There had been an early attempt to simply scan documents after they were submitted in printed form, but that quickly bogged down as well. At times, boxes of case files were stacked up in the aisles of the documents room, creating a dangerous fire hazard. And with only a few exceptions, these were all public records that we, the rest of us who aren’t directly part of the court system, have the right to inspect and, if necessary, copy.

That says to me that allowing public access is a secondary feature of the system. And that means that, at most, there are, at most, only incremental costs incurred by allowing public use of the system. So financial problems appear to be the only barrier to providing free and open public access to court records as well as those of other state and county agencies, many of which already make their document retrieval systems publicly available at no charge.

The Judiciary’s log-in page says online payments for document retrieval are handled through the Hawaii Information Consortium, which does business as NIC Hawaii, the same group behind other major agency websites in Hawaii.

NIC HAWAII

The portal manager is the Hawaii Information Consortium, LLC dba NIC Hawaii, a Hawaii corporation and wholly owned subsidiary of eGovernment firm NIC Inc. (NASDAQ: EGOV). Our sole focus is to develop, manage and maintain web-based services that make working with the government easier for the public while improving efficiency. We also manage the official website for the state of Hawaii, Hawaii.gov.

The eHawaii.gov program was initially launched in 2000. Since then over 160 web-based services have been deployed and over 2.5 million citizens visit our site annually. While we operate as a for-profit company, state agencies, counties and local government can in many cases, work with us at no cost by utilizing our unique self funded model.

For more information, see the FAQs or visit nichawaii.egov.com.https://nichawaii.egov.com/portfolio/

And last year, NIC became a wholly owned subsidiary of Tyler Technologies.

The answer to the questions about the hurdles that would have to be overcome in order to make court records available to the public without fees is, I’m sure, buried in all the links provided by NIC and the Hawaii Information Consortium.

Please dig in and share your discoveries, thoughts and observations.

Another bit of online frustration with a state data service

3 Replies

I’ve been doing some research that includes tracing the history of a few condominium projects.

The Real Estate Branch of the Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs is the repository for Public Reports condo developers are required to file. These reports document the original development and marketing of condo projects and provide information potential buyers are legally entitled to.

At the top of the Real Estate Branch website is a prominent notice advising consumers that only limited staff resources are available, during limited hours, to assist the public during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Instead, “customers are strongly recommended to utilize electronic communications methods….”

Fair enough. But when your agency directs people to online services, it’s important to be sure they are up and running.

That wasn’t the case with the records I was trying to access.

The Real Estate Branch provides a link to “Resources for Condominium owners, prospective buyers, Boards of Directors, and associations.”

Clicking that link gets you a bit closer, it would appear.

Down mid-page is a further link to “CONDOMINIUM ASSOCIATION CONTACT INFORMATION, DEVELOPER’S PUBLIC REPORT DATABASE, & STATEWIDE INTERACTIVE MAP OF PROJECTS.”

Bingo. Almost there?

Click on that link and you get a disclaimer and statement of terms of use. If you want to proceed to the reports, you click “I Agree.”

Alright. I do it.

And…nothing. Nada. The request times out.

Dcca server

And it isn’t that the server is simply busy, as it has been a persistent issue over several days.

This morning I sent off email inquiries to DCCA and to a service I use that provides its own links to the state data.

I’m going to be interested if DCCA can restore public access in a timely manner.

Update: This reply from Jason Horiuchi at DCCA said the problem arose because of steps taken to protect the department’s computer systems from Hurricane Douglas. In an early morning email, he wrote:

“I actually just inquired with our IT folks about this yesterday.  They informed me that to protect it from potential damage arising from Hurricane Douglas, DCCA’s servers were shut down over the weekend.  Unfortunately they experienced difficulty bringing that particular server hosting that website back online.  Not sure on the technical details, but I was told they are “rebuilding it.” They did not have a current ETA for me, however, since they were aware of the problem and working on it I hope it is back online soon.”

State moving to new public access data portal

Leave a reply

Back in October 2012, the State of Hawaii launched a new website, data.hawaii.gov, which was described at the time as “an important new tool that will help to transform government and increase public accessibility to public records.”

It was part of Governor Neil Abercrombie’s attempt to upgrade the state’s technology infrastructure in a way that would increase public access to government data by gathering it in a central online portal.

It was run by Socrata, which had also been selected for the federal government’s data.gov website offering access to datasets from federal agencies.

Now the state’s contract with Socrata is due to expire in August, and the officially launched a new data portal last month on a platform developed by a Socrata competitor, OpenGov. The new portal can be found at opendata.hawaii.gov.

At least one agency has run into an apparently unexpected technical glitch that has created a new problem.

The Hawaii State Ethics Commission processes thousands of public filings each year, including annual financial disclosure and gift disclosure forms filed by state employees and public officials, along with lobbyist registrations and disclosure of lobbyist expenditures. Although some of these financial disclosures are confidential, many others are meant to be publicly accessible for inspection.

Until recently, its lists of disclosures were available for viewing and downloading via the state’s data portal. This provided the public with the ability to ask and answer more complex or focused questions. Rather than simply being able to view the expenditures disclosed during a particular year by a particular organization’s lobbyists, it was simple to download the data and look at trends over a period of years. I used the data to rank organizations by the amounts they spend on lobbying, and update those lists over different time periods.

But when the latest deadline for lobbyist disclosures passed, I discovered the data is no longer available for downloads.

So I sent a query to the commission, and received a prompt reply from Executive Director Dan Gluck.

From what I understand, we used to have all our data in Socrata, which you could download, but we’ve been migrating everything over to Salesforce. Our new e-filing system uses Salesforce, so this way, people file their forms (in Salesforce) and then they’re available on-line without us having to tinker with them too much. We’ve also been migrating our old data into Salesforce so that everything’s in one place. The downside is that I don’t think that you can download the data on the public side like you could with Socrata….

The remaining Socrata datasets will be taken off-line in August, I think, so if you’re interested in that data, you may want to download that now.”

Gluck also said the commission staff can download the datasets into Excel or CSV files on request, so hopefully this will at least retain the same level of accessibility that has existed in recent years.

In any case, I immediately contacted the Campaign Spending Commission, and was relieved to find out campaign-related data will continue to be readily accessible going forward.

According to an email from Tony Baldomero, the commission’s associate executive director, “our datasets will still be available to you and the public for download. There’s no change to this in the horizon.”

“The Commission’s candidate and noncandidate committee datasets which you can access on data.hawaii.gov can already be found on opendata.hawaii.gov for you to access,” Baldomero said in an email. “We will continue to have our datasets on both open data sites until data.hawaii.gov is phased out by the State or until our separate contract with Socrata ends.”

See also:

“Browsing the State Ethic Commission’s online disclosure system,” iLind.net, July 3, 2019.

Legal records creating potential safety hazard for state courts

1 Reply

Law suits, criminal prosecutions, and the legal proceedings of all kinds produce mountains of paperwork. And after years of relative neglect, all that paper could appears to now pose a hazard to both court workers and the public.

The potentially dangerous conditions are apparent in the public records room at Honolulu’s 1st Circuit Court on Punchbowl Street. This is where the public has to come to inspect the original, certified legal files produced in civil and criminal court cases. Obviously, in our litigious society, keeping up with the ever-growing amount of paper is difficult but vitally important.

But document storage and retrieval is one of those areas in which the Judiciary appears to be falling further and further behind, most likely because of budget constraints. Despite the fact that certain types of files can now be submitted electronically, with documents filed and available online, the paper records keep stacking up.

Eventually, boxes of older files are supposed to be moved to storage, and then scanned. In the meantime, they fill more and more of the space in the public records room and elsewhere in the court building, as well as in rented spaces off site.

It’s now appears to have gotten to the danger point. If a fire were ever to break out, both employees and the public would be at risk.

Remember back in the 1990s when the Honolulu Fire Department released scathing inspection reports showing that “every Oahu high school was found in violation of minimum state fire-code standards,” according to a February 1992 headline in the Honolulu Advertiser?

HFD inspections at that time found that most Oahu public high schools at the time had “unsatisfactory” fire alarm systems, and had a number of other common dangers, including blocked fire exists, missing or broken fire extinguishers, improper storage of flammable materials, and poorly maintained electrical appliances.

If fire inspectors would pay a serious visit to the public records room at Honolulu’s First Circuit Court on Punchbowl Street, I’m sure they would find much the same thing.

Here are a couple of photos taken in the public records room when I stopped by last month to check out a couple of recent civil lawsuits.

The top photo shows the staff-only area separated from the public area by a counter that runs the length of the room (a bit of it is visible in the foreground. Case files are stored on the tall shelves that fill the room. Older files are stacked in boxes within the rows between shelves.

It has gotten to the point that staff searching for a particular case can’t easily walk up and down the rows. They now have to squeeze past the boxes of older records to get to more recent ones.

The bottom photo shows the area just inside the public entrance to the file room. As you enter or leave the room, you walk past more stacked storage boxes filled with paper files. I didn’t count, but judging from the photo, there are probably close to 300 boxes that fill the corner just inside the entrance. If a fire were to break out there, the only visible public exit would be blocked.

I’ve been told court workers have complained about the situation, but that hasn’t been enough to prod judiciary administrators to make cleaning up this mess a priority.

And I would also guess that the court building, like other older state facilities, relies on extension cords and other makeshift arrangements to make up for the lack of a modern electrical system. Typically, you will find those extension cords running behind, under, and around furniture, equipment, and carpets in order to power coffee cups, computers, desk lamps, and other electrical items. To a fire inspector, I would guess it’s not a pretty sight.

And I seriously doubt the neighbor island courts have it any better.

The Judiciary has made several attempts in the past to address the situation. Back in 2003, the courts launched what they hoped would be a modern data system that would include digital imaging of paper records that would be available to the public.

Today, appellate and criminal cases use an electronic filing system, but the sprawling civil court system still generates those mountains of paper.