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In 2018, a mobile home park owner in Stevens Point lost his operator’s license after submitting falsified drinking water samples to the state, purportedly leaving longtime residents of the park at risk of consuming excess iron and manganese. He appealed.

In 2022, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources authorized the spreading of human waste on farmland in Vilas County. A nearby Indigenous tribe contested the permit when it became apparent the state hadn’t included sufficient setbacks from tribal land.

And in 2021, a wildlife rehabilitator in Frederic, Wisconsin, who also served as a local police chief, lost her rehabilitation license after a raccoon in her care — Gimpy — bit an employee. The rehabilitator appealed.

These cases, all of which went to administrative hearings, pit state regulatory authority against individual residents. That’s why I was interested in reading them in my role as an investigative reporter. But I learned vital information in these and other cases, nearly always the parties’ names and places of work, is missing. 

Wisconsin’s Division of Hearings and Appeals, the agency that oversees administrative hearings for several state departments, has taken to posting only heavily redacted records on its website. That means readers will often see black bars drawn through the names of people and businesses, state employees who evaluate permits and licenses, attorneys who represent parties and even newspapers that publish notices related to the cases.

Division Administrator Brian Hayes told me that last year’s passage of a state law prompted the DHA to evaluate how it posts personally identifying information on its website. That law enables judges to request that their personal information, including addresses and telephone numbers, be removed from public view. 

The DHA, Hayes said, extended this protection to witnesses and petitioners, saying disclosing this information “needlessly opens up litigants to scams and stalkers.”

Hayes noted, however, that personally identifying information likely would have to be released to someone who submitted a records request for unaltered documents.

So I submitted one.

It took two months and the assistance of an attorney to wrestle the name of Gimpy’s owner from the agency. (Gimpy, however, was named.) The employees I encountered in this process offered a moving target of justifications.

First, DHA’s records custodian said she can provide unredacted documents only to parties to a case and suggested that I request the redacted version. I pointed out that the law requires her to either release the requested record or offer a legal justification for withholding it.

Another employee cited Wisconsin’s 1980 victims’ rights law, which provides a bill of rights for witnesses and victims of crime. The problem with this excuse is that the protections are situated in Wisconsin criminal code, not licensing.

In the end, I received unredacted records in the raccoon case and an apology from DHA for the difficulties I encountered in obtaining this information. But I still am moved to question the will to secrecy at the heart of this matter.

In fact, many of these cases involve public hearings. Anyone who attended could presumably observe witnesses and evidence — or see the names of parties on public notices state agencies post to announce hearing schedules.

When protective laws are zealously applied to contexts for which they were not intended, it can cause its own form of harm. The public is circuitously deprived of information related to potentially unscrupulous activity on the part of both individuals and government.

It shouldn’t take an attorney to pry open the gates for administrative decisions, even if the state means well.

Your Right to Know is a monthly column distributed by the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council (wisfoic.org), a nonprofit, nonpartisan group dedicated to open government. Bennet Goldstein is an investigative reporter with Wisconsin Watch.

Your Right to Know: The problem with the will to secrecy is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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In a 2007 ruling known as Zellner v. Cedarburg School District, the Wisconsin Supreme Court declared that because public school teachers “are entrusted with the responsibility of teaching children,” the public has a clear right to know about allegations of misconduct against educators.

I wonder what the justices would think of a school district trying to charge $5,600 for this information. Or $40,000. Or $245,000.

Those were among the actual cost estimates that Wisconsin school districts provided when my paper, the Cap Times, asked for public records about teachers accused of sexual misconduct.

Such misconduct is a more pervasive problem in schools than you might think. An estimated one in 10 students experiences sexual harassment or assault from an educator during their K-12 schooling, according to one comprehensive case study in 2004. In Wisconsin, that rate would amount to more than 93,000 school children based on last year’s private and public school statewide enrollment.

But there is no statewide comprehensive data tracking of such allegations, so the Cap Times set out to determine how often educators are investigated for sexual misconduct toward students, and how allegations to this effect are handled.

For a report to be published later this month, the Cap Times sought employee investigation records, reprimands and resignation agreements over the last eight years from districts across Wisconsin.

The responses took the newspaper by surprise. I’m not referring to the actual records — which, when the Cap Times eventually received them, were shocking in other ways. What first stunned us were the amounts the districts demanded just to look for these documents.

The Middleton-Cross Plains Area School District outside of Madison put the upfront cost of locating these records at $40,000. Sheboygan wanted $18,000, Oshkosh wanted $6,600, Appleton wanted $5,600, and Madison wanted $4,500.

Leading the pack was the Janesville School District, which asked for $245,000. The district has 9,400 students and roughly 1,500 employees, making it the ninth largest district in the state. Milwaukee Public Schools, the largest school district in the state at 66,000 students, quoted the Cap Times about $1,100 for the exact same records request. MPS also has six times more employees, meaning more records to search.

After a Cap Times reporter spoke on the phone with Janesville assistant superintendent Scott Garner, this charge disappeared. For some of the districts, the newspaper had to identify names of specific teachers and narrow the scope of its requests to get a reasonable cost estimate. For others, including Madison, we still have not received records despite our attempts to make their searches easier.

The suspicion remains that the initial price tags from some of these districts were not based on the “actual, necessary and direct cost” of locating these records, as the Open Records Law allows, but on a desire to make these requests go away.

Then there were school districts, including Racine and Waukesha, where officials said they couldn’t fulfill the request at all because it would be too burdensome.

Refusing to provide this information, or charging prohibitive fees for such records, is antithetical to school districts’ legal duty — and moral obligation — of transparency. 

Educators have unique access to children and an enormous amount of responsibility for their safety at school. By far the majority can be trusted with those responsibilities. But in some cases that trust is violated — as in the state Supreme Court’s 2007 ruling, involving an educator who was viewing adult websites on his school computer.

As the court said in its decision, “The public has an interest in knowing about such allegations of teacher misconduct and how they are handled.”

And, I would add, members of the public shouldn’t have to take out a loan to get this information.

Your Right to Know is a monthly column distributed by the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council (wisfoic.org), a nonprofit, nonpartisan group dedicated to open government. Council secretary Mark Treinen (mtreinen@captimes.com) is editor of the Cap Times in Madison.

Your Right to Know: Costs shouldn’t be used to deter records requests is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.