STUART — The public records at the center of a lawsuit were not removed in the middle of the night, Martin County Schools Superintendent Nancy Kline said Wednesday.

Florida Mechanical, which has filed two lawsuits including one filed Monday claiming the district is not complying with public records laws, alleged that the records were removed from Martin County School Board Attorney Doug Griffin’s computer “surreptitiously, under the cover of night and without notice to Mr. Griffin.”

But Kline said the records were remotely taken from Griffin’s office during office hours on Sept. 11, and district staff tried to tell Griffin beforehand. The records were related to a public records request from Florida Mechanical.

“There were no records moved in the middle of the night,” Kline said. “It’s my understanding that (labor and employment representative Kim) Sabol and (executive director of educational technology Steve) Weil went to Doug’s office several times and he wasn’t there.”

He said he did not learn the documents were retrieved until he tried to access them on Sept. 11.

Later that day, Griffin said he received a memo from Sabol and Weil.

Griffin said Kline asked him to handle the public records request in June and he reviewed more than 1,200 e-mails for the request.

“I didn’t see anything that I thought should be exempt or I would have excluded it,” Griffin said. “But in terms of interpreting the legal exemptions, I’m the school board attorney and that’s my responsibility.”

But Kline, who wrote in an undated memo to Griffin and board members that she retrieved the records “when it became apparent that the records were going to be produced without the opportunity of review” by her office. She said she is the lawful custodian for the records and cited a previous case from 1998 involving the city of West Palm Beach.

Kline said she expects the review of the records request to be done this week.

“It’s my responsibility and I believe I acted in the best interest of the district,” Kline said, noting that as the district’s records custodian she is responsible “for insuring that any proper exemption is asserted.”

In its lawsuit, Florida Mechanical also calls Kline the “chief custodian of the public records for the School Board.”

However, who is the custodian of the public records is not the issue, said Alexis Lambert, a Sunshine Law attorney for Florida’s attorney general.

“The issue is whether or not the agency is providing public records pursuant to the standards of Chapter 119,” Lambert said.

Kelly Tyko

Tags: florida mechanical, lawsuit, martin county schools, public record

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 1st, 2009 at 10:57 am and is filed under Martin County, Schools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.