Seattle officials unveil legislation to protect public disclosure employees

Seattle City Council President Lorena Gonzalez and City Attorney Pete Holmes announced new legislation to provide worker protections and job security to public disclosure officers (PDOs) who process public records on behalf of elected officials.

According to the city, the goal of the legislation is to ensure city employees are protected from political influence while carrying out their duties to respond to Public Records Act requests on behalf of elected officials. It aims to protect PDOs, and ultimately strengthen public trust in city government.

“Public disclosure officers are diligent public servants responsible for ensuring the City and its elected officials adhere fully to the expectation of transparency under the Public Records Act. They should never fear the repercussions of advocating for more transparency on the public’s behalf, nor should they have to go to the extreme measure of a whistleblower complaint,” Gonzalez said.

Gonzalez and Holmes’ offices worked with partners at the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission, Seattle Information Technology Department, and with PDOs themselves to develop this legislation.

It will be considered in Gonzalez’s virtual Governance and Education Committee on July 13 at 2 p.m.

Seattle Times files lawsuit over missing text messages from Mayor Durkan

A May 2021 report showed that Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan’s office failed to properly handle a series of public records requests, after discovering 10 months of the mayor’s text messages had gone missing. Gonzalez and Holmes had previously hoped to address the root cause of that controversy, proposing a new, independent entity specifically to handle records requests to the mayor’s office.

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