Editorial: Why The Eagle is suing Sedgwick County over an ambulance system audit
We’re suing the county so you don’t have to.
The Wichita Eagle on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against Sedgwick County seeking to obtain access to an audit of its Emergency Medical Services Department.
We don’t do that lightly. This is literally a matter of life and death.
The document at issue is a $50,000 taxpayer-funded report providing a comprehensive analysis of shortcomings in the ambulance system.
It should contain some definitive answers as to why county-run ambulances showed up late for 11,000 calls for people in medical crisis over the last three years.
It should also shed more light on arguably the worst medical judgment call in county history, when former EMS director Dr. John Gallagher ordered paramedics to not transport a patient to the hospital after a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Left untreated, the man died 10½ agonizing hours later.
The public interest is undeniable. The county withholding the report is unjustifiable.
The county sees it differently and has repeatedly turned aside Eagle requests for the report under the Kansas Open Records Act.
Part of the problem is the act itself. It’s one of the weakest public records laws in America.
It starts with a high-sounding statement that it’s “the public policy of the state that public records shall be open for inspection by any person unless otherwise provided by this act, and this act shall be liberally construed and applied to promote such policy.”
What follows are 54 exemptions that can be stretched to fit pretty much any scenario where public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure of incompetence or shady dealings.
The county contends the EMS report is protected by attorney-client privilege and Exemption 25 of the act: “Records that represent and constitute the work product of an attorney.”
The Eagle fully recognizes that legal advice needs to be protected from disclosure at times, because it could weaken the county’s — and by extension the public’s — position in litigation.
But that’s not the situation here. The EMS report is a performance audit, evaluating the operation of a government agency and how to improve it.
It’s not legal advice, it’s business advice that happened to have been prepared by a law firm.
Our lawsuit quotes a 2020 “news alert” that the firm that made the report, Hite, Fanning and Honeyman, sent to its clients outlining the difference. It explained that “[o]nly confidential communications which involve the requesting or giving of legal advice are privileged.”
In this case, lawyer involvement was more happenstance than intentional anyway.
County officials initially picked an accounting firm, Allen, Gibbs and Houlik, to do the independent review of the EMS department.
But they shifted the contract to Hite Fanning after EMS employees expressed conflict of interest concerns about AGH.
Paul Allen, a partner in AGH, was on the board of the Greater Wichita Partnership with County Manager Tom Stolz and Commissioner Pete Meitzner at the time.
The county also claims the records are shielded by personnel and privacy exemptions in the act.
But we’re not asking for Social Security numbers or home addresses. We want to know how public officials handled — or mishandled — vital public duties.
That’s neither personal nor private.
The biggest frustration is that it takes a media organization with the throw weight of The Wichita Eagle to go to court to enforce a sunshine law that’s supposed to protect everybody’s access to information about their government.
But under the Kansas Open Records Act, the ordinary citizen doesn’t stand a chance.
The people of Sedgwick County deserve better — better ambulance service, certainly; and better access to information about what went wrong when they’re not getting what they pay for.
