Prosser pays $175,000 to settle public records lawsuit

PROSSER, Wash. -- City Hall will pay one of its most persistent critics $175,000 to settle a lawsuit over public records.

The city will pay the money to Larry Loges, who sued in 2006 claiming that Prosser violated state public disclosure laws by improperly or incompletely responding to numerous public records requests.

Mayor Paul Warden said it would have cost $500,000 or more to go to a trial that could have dragged on for years with no clear winner.

"I just want to move forward," Warden said Wednesday.

A trial had been set to start Aug. 10 in Benton County Superior Court.

Prosser City Council members unanimously approved the settlement Tuesday night, Warden said.

Money for the settlement will come from reserve funds, said Charlie Bush, city administrator.

The settlement closes only one chapter in Loges' long-running battles with the Prosser municipal government over everything from public records to water bills to trailers.

City officials claim Loges, who owns two trailer parks at the north edge of town, has a history of trying to avoid permits for construction, putting up signs and moving trailers. In 2007, the city sued him for an unpermitted trailer. Loges finally tore it down, leaving only a toilet sitting on the property for several days.

For his part, Loges often has used his property as a soapbox for criticism of City Hall, spray-painting remarks on his trailers so passers-by could read them. He even displayed a blow-up doll meant to depict former Mayor Linda Lusk.

Loges has filed three claims -- each denied by the city -- relating to his trailers and an alleged civil rights violation during a traffic stop by city police, Bush said.

But Loges is most known at City Hall for his volumes of public records requests. He has filed 213 since 2006.

The settlement applies only to 22 disputed 2006 records and follows an earlier pretrial ruling by Benton County Superior Court Judge Cameron Mitchell that the city improperly handled 11 of 22 requests.

Both sides say the settlement amount falls short of the costs related to the suit. Bush estimates that the city paid $200,000 to its attorney Howard Saxton to cover the case.

Cities must, by state law, respond to public records requests within five days.

However, Prosser city staff members often complained that Loges buried them with so many, they couldn't keep up and missed some. At one point, they estimated two City Hall clerks were spending one out of every five days on the job meeting Loges' demands.

They often didn't understand the requests in the first place, Warden said.

"Sometimes his requests, we didn't know what he meant," Warden said.

Loges once submitted a letter asking for a sign application, then returned about five minutes later to make a public records request for his original letter. He claims he just wanted a receipt and the staff wouldn't give it to him.

Such disputes are not uncommon for small towns that can't afford to designate an employee to records, said Luann Hopkins, a policy analyst for the Association of Washington Cities."It's not an excuse, just an explanation," Hopkins said.

Several bills in the 2009 state legislature aimed to take the pressure off, she said.

One would have raised the limit on the cost of copies. Another would have allowed cities to deny requests to people who had unpaid balances from previous requests. Still another would have set up a court procedure to determine when records requests amounted to harassment.

They all failed.

Since the lawsuit, the city of Prosser has hired a city clerk and deputy city clerk to help process records requests. The duty was previously handled by Cathleen Koch, both the city clerk and finance director at the time. City staff also have posted more information on the city Web site.

As a result, public records requests have dropped significantly, while Loges said he has "calmed down."

He has filed only nine requests so far this year.

There have been several high-profile public records cases in Central Washington this year.

In June, a judge ordered the state Department of Labor and Industries to pay a Benton City man more than $500,000 for failing to comply with his 2007 public records request. That case, however, is in limbo after the state Supreme Court rejected another open records case that could have a bearing on it.

The small town of Mesa, north of the Tri-Cities, is considering bankruptcy or disincorporation after being hit with $246,000 in attorney fees and legal penalties for violations related to the open records law filed against the city by its former mayor.

* Ross Courtney can be reached at 509-930-8798 or rcourtney@yakimaherald.com.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This story has been corrected from an earlier version in which comments were wrongly attributed to Larry Loges. While Loges said he questioned whether he’d get a favorable outcome in his open records lawsuit against the city of Prosser had the case gone to trial, he did not state or imply that he distrusts judges.