Cotterell: Candidates shouldn’t try to hide public records

Every candidate for every office promises to run the most open, transparent, above-board administration you’ve ever seen.

No secret meetings. No backroom deals or hidden documents. No more wink-and-a-nod fixeroos on government contracts.

And then, once elected, they pretty much do operate openly — at least, as openly as the Sunshine Law requires. When sunshine gets inconvenient, there are ways to pull the shades.

It’s highly unusual, though, for a politician to seek official secrecy while also running for office. When you’re a candidate, you want to appear as candid as possible — “candid” being the word that “candidate” comes from.

So it’s hard to understand why Tallahassee City Hall was so reluctant in releasing Mayor Andrew Gillum’s appointments calendars. The mayor’s office is officially separate from the Gillum for Governor campaign but, if one can’t help the other, you’d think they’d try to avoid causing any harm.

What happened was, the Tallahassee Democrat made a public-records request for Gillum’s calendars and e-mails containing certain references, going back to the start of 2016. City Hall responded last May by providing redacted calendars, with numerous events deleted.

The official reason was that a public employee’s schedule is public, but that “personal/private matters” written on it may be withheld because “they are simply not public records.”

Except, actually, they are.

The newspaper got a pretty good First Amendment lawyer to “negotiate” release of the unexpurgated calendars. I was not in on any part of this story, but I imagine the “negotiation” went something like:

Paper: “This information is going to wind up on the front page. Would you prefer that the story say you provided it — or that a court forced you to provide it?”

City: “OK, here you go, always nice negotiating with you.”

The mayor’s office got even, a little, by doing a document dump to all local media. It issued a statement saying that because of a public-records request by one news outlet, it was providing the uncensored calendars to all.

OK. No harm. As long as they comply with the law, they can be childish about it.

Truthfully, there were no smoking guns. Gillum’s staff had tried to cover up some travel arrangements with People for the American Way, a liberal bunch that employed him until February, along with some work with Forward Florida, the Gillum political committee.

More interesting — but hardly worth concealing — were some dinners and meetings Gillum had with business people who have been subpoenaed in the current federal investigation of the Community Redevelopment Agency. As Gillum has said, he was not subpoenaed and he is not considered a subject of the investigation.

Such meetings are legal. The mayor is not an hourly employee. He doesn’t punch a time clock and if he wants to duck out for a family matter or a social event, that’s his business. He gets paid to get the job done, not for the time it takes to do it.

But when events are noted on his official calendar, the public record may not be altered just because he feels like it. Or more likely, someone in his office felt like it.

Gillum has had to apologize for some overlap between his city office and his political campaign. He reimbursed the city nearly $5,000 for a computer program favored by Democratic politicians. There was an investigation, but Gillum was cleared of any wrongdoing this week.

It was fairly trivial. It shouldn’t happen, but it does, in any busy office or major operation like a statewide campaign.

But when your name is bandied about in stories containing the words “FBI,” “subpoena” and “grand jury,” when you’re running for governor, when you’ve already apologized for a couple previous mistakes, this is not the time to be redacting things from your old appointments tracker. Why look like you’re trying to hide something, when you could look like you’re being extra candid?

Want to see my calendar? Want to know what I had for breakfast? Maybe my dental x-rays and the names of my dogs? Hey, you got it.

Gillum ought to tell the city attorney that nothing except legally exempt security secrets is to be blotted out of his official record. Then he ought to go by his public-records office and personally confiscate every little bottle of Wite-Out correction fluid.

Nothing being hidden could be as bad as the attempt to hide it.

Bill Cotterell is a retired Tallahassee Democrat reporter who writes a twice-weekly column. He can be reached atbcotterell@tallahassee.com .