أغر؟´«أ½

ST. LOUIS — أغر؟´«أ½ released city employee pay records to the Post-Dispatch this week, after stalling for nine months and two days.

The release comes as multiple government transparency advocates criticized the administration of أغر؟´«أ½ Mayor Tishaura O. Jones, alleging the city has kept records from the public.

The newspaper’s counsel, Joe Martineau, had to get involved before was provided to the newspaper.

“For the ordinary citizen, for the common citizen, most of them are going to give up in the face of this,â€‌ said Dave Roland, director of litigation for the Freedom Center of Missouri, which advocates for transparency in government. “Whatever they might find, it’s not worth the hassle, it’s not worth the constant conflict to get results.â€‌

“And I think that’s what government entities count on,â€‌ Roland added.

The day before the newspaper’s Sunshine request was finally fulfilled, Elad Gross, a local civil rights attorney, filed a lawsuit against أغر؟´«أ½ alleging the city government has developed a “schemeâ€‌ to routinely keep records from the public.

The newspaper’s request is part of the أغر؟´«أ½ Post-Dispatch public payroll database. More than 200 agencies in Missouri and Illinois responded to the paper’s Sunshine and Freedom of Information requests in time for the project’s publication on Aug. 28.

أغر؟´«أ½ was not included in that version of the database. For months, the city insisted that its personnel department could only provide the newspaper with salary estimates and year-to-date overtime pay. The newspaper’s request was for أغر؟´«أ½ employee 2021 gross pay.

The city’s Sunshine Law coordinator, Joseph Sims, said in a statement provided with the data on Wednesday that the city was providing the records as a “one-time accommodation for your request that goes beyond the requirements of the Sunshine Law.â€‌

But Jean Maneke, an attorney who represents the Missouri Press Association, said the kind of information the newspaper asked for is just the baseline of what citizens should be able to see.

“Any record that a government body makes is a record of business that it’s doing on behalf of citizens,â€‌ Maneke said. “Citizens who pay their taxes to a public body have a right to inspect how that money is spent and judge for themselves.â€‌

Sims directed further questions to the city counselor’s office. The city counselor’s office did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for Jones said she has no comment at the time.

The process, Gross said, has glaring issues.

“If the system أغر؟´«أ½ city is using to make public records available to the public is essentially unusable by the public, and requires all this navigation, and lawsuits, and threats of lawsuits, and everything else, just to get some public records — then essentially it’s not access at all,â€‌ Gross said.