Not for the first time, the City of St. Louis' handling of public records requests has made it the target of a lawsuit, this time from a resident who wanted to know what city officials were saying about attempts to regulate short-term rentals.
The resident’s lawyer, Dave Roland, says the suit seeks to prove that how the city handles requests for emails is unlawful.
Roland represents local activist Michelle Pona. This summer, she was one of many residents urging the Board of Aldermen to crack down on Airbnbs and other short-term rentals. Those rentals were becoming the sites of raucous and disruptive parties hosted by people who had rented places like downtown apartments or south city houses for one night only.
In October, the Board did pass two bills which, beginning next year, will forbid single-night rentals and require hosts to have an agent available 24/7 for renters and neighbors to contact.
Pona, who lives in Southwest Garden, was of the belief that those regulations didn’t go far enough. She also believed, according to her lawsuit, that Mayor Tishaura Jones' deputy chief of staff Sara Baker had been "collaborating" on the specifics of the proposed legislation with corporate players in the short-term rental industry and the Realtors Association.
So on October 2, Pona submitted a Sunshine Law request to the city seeking copies of any emails or text messages to and from Baker that "contain[ed] anything about short term rentals, board bill 33, board bill 34, Airbnb, vrbo, realtors association, airbnb lobbyist[.]”
Pona submitted a similar request for Ward 4 Alderman Bret Narayan’s communications, too.
Pona says she received a reply from the city's sunshine coordinator Joseph Sims.
A decent amount of local ink has been spilled about Sims. In September of last year, Post columnist Tony Messenger wrote that Sims was "becoming infamous among the circles of folks — especially reporters and attorneys — who regularly file requests for open records with the city."
Sims informed Pona that 755 of Baker's messages were potentially relevant to the request. Sims said that they needed to be converted from their native email format into PDFs and reviewed for their relevance. That would cost Pona almost $1,600.
Understandably not wanting to shell out that kind of money, Pona subsequently amended her request to ask for all 755 emails in their native format, with the intention that all 755 emails would be inherently responsive and therefore wouldn't need to be reviewed or converted in any way.
However, Sims replied to that request saying that the records had to be reviewed by the city for their relevance before they could be released.
Pona argued that all 755 emails by definition were responsive to her second request.
That argument fell on deaf ears; Sims reiterated his previous message that the city needed $1,500 to convert and review the files before their release.
Sims and Pona went through an almost identical rigmarole with her request for Narayan's emails, though the price tag on that request was even higher, at $3,000.
"What possible world would you need to review these emails to find out if they're responsive if the citizen has said they're all responsive?" asks Roland, Pona's attorney and the director of litigation at the Freedom Center of Missouri, a libertarian law firm that frequently handles Sunshine Law cases. "It makes no sense at all, unless someone's goal is to delay or prevent those emails from getting in the hands of the citizen who asked for them."
The lawsuit Roland filed on behalf of Pona yesterday closely mirrors another lawsuit filed by Elad Gross, a candidate for Missouri attorney general, in September 2022. That lawsuit, which pertains to access to jail records, is still ongoing.
At an April hearing in that suit, Gross cross-examined Sims on the stand. His testimony revealed that the city’s protocols for handling Sunshine requests are anything but straightforward: each agency has their own custodian of records, but it’s not always clear who that person is; those records custodians communicate with Sims, and Sims communicates with the person making the request — except when Sims doesn't hear back from the records custodian. Sims acknowledged that responses form the city rely heavily on email templates and that at times he himself arbitrarily assigns dates for when requests can be fulfilled.
Roland says that the suit filed yesterday gets at an issue that is much bigger than short-term rentals in the city. He is hoping to chip away at what he calls the “lengthy and astonishingly expensive review process” city records requests have to go through before they can be released — if they are released at all.
"We have seen over the last several years government entities throwing up unnecessary roadblocks preventing citizens or delaying citizens in getting public records," Roland says. "And we see this case as an opportunity to clarify that those roadblocks are unlawful."
We welcome tips and feedback. Email the author at ryan.krull@riverfronttimes.com
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