Board of Aldermen 09-22-2020 Page 25
Alderman Klee
Thank you, Madam President. | am in favor of this position and I'll tell you why. When | worked for the
Department of Defense and even through the VA, the Department of Veterans Affairs, | dealt with FOYA.
That was one of my duties and one of my jobs. And when the Departments would get a request for any
kind of information they would forward it to me. | would go through, look through what documents needed
to be gotten. Then | usually sent it back to them telling them what documents | needed in order to do it. It
would come back to me for a review and if necessary, redaction and to make sure that nothing went out. |
usually sent it back to them so we did this back and forth and so on. The reason why we did that both
when | worked for West (inaudible) Airforce Base and when | worked for the VA was because it’s
impossible for every employee to know every little nuance of wnat can be given and what can't be given,
especially sometimes when it comes to numbers. Sometimes we were able to give a street address but we
couldn’t give the number of the street. If someone called and wanted a salary, at that point in time, we
couldn't give, they couldn’t say, “OK | want to know wnat this person’s salary is”. We could not give it. We
could give a range of what the position was. And sometimes just to save everybody it and as the Mayor
said, sometimes just the wrong answer can get you in a whole lot of trouble. So! think having one center
pointis the best way to handle all of these thank you.
President Wilshire
Alderman Lu?
Alderwoman Lu
| appreciate Alderman Klee’s description of her experience with this. | wish that | heard that sooner
because it’s very helpful. | feel that, | wonder if there has been education, you know, how much training we
have given to the various Departments. This just seems like standard operating procedure to some extent.
| mean atleast as far as, | don’t mean the number of requests that are received, | understand thats really
high. But it seems to me that every Department needs to be trained to, that was wnat | came into this
meeting believing that each Department should be prepared to address this. But! take Alderman Klee’s
comments — my concern is that it’s centralized and there is one individual that becomes like a gatekeeper
to some extent.
| also want to take the opportunity at this point to ask about whether its — can an individual ask for
information without it having to go through their attomey? Because | know that the lady who Alderman
Clemons referred to, | believe, the woman who spoke very upset about this, has told us all in her letters to
the Board of Aldermen that when she’s tried to get information on cases subsequentto a case which she
did hire an attorney, that we no longer allowed her to deal as an individual with City Hall. And | just wonder
if that is the case?
Attorney Bolton
May | respond?
President Wilshire
Attorney Bolton?
Attorney Bolton
That is untrue. We have answered every single Right to Know Request that she has made. We have not
refused to deal with her because she is or because she isn’t represented by an attorney on any particular
Right to Know Request. We have had some difficulty in determining when she is being represented by an
attorney and when she is not. One of her complaints has been we have sometimes copied her attorney
who is representing her in many things, in some cases where she says he is not representing her. The fact
