The city of Shoreline and Deputy Mayor Maggie Fimia are facing a lawsuit in King County Superior Court.
Filed on Nov. 21 by Shoreline residents Beth and Doug O’Neill, the lawsuit alleges that Fimia and city staff failed to comply with public disclosure requests and that Fimia destroyed an e-mail requested by O’Neill.
“It’s a matter of principle for her to do that,” O’Neill said. “If she could do it to me, she could do it to anybody.”
Fimia denies the allegations in the suit.
“I spent 25 to 30 hours responding to O’Neill’s disclosure requests and gave everything in a timely way,” Fimia said. “The information she is trying to get was never there.”
The lawsuit alleges that public disclosure laws were violated on a number of occasions after O’Neill requested an e-mail that was referred to by Fimia at a Sept. 18 Council meeting.
At the meeting, Fimia said she had received an e-mail from a “Ms. Hettrick and a Ms. O’Neill that made serious allegations … that Council members were using their influence to affect this code enforcement issue.”
The e-mail Fimia referenced had been written by an acquaintance of O’Neill’s regarding a zoning complaint at the home of O’Neill’s neighbor.
According to a statement from O’Neill: “Fimia’s remarks came as a complete shock to me and caught me completely off guard. I had not written such an e-mail … During public comment I stated that I had not written an e-mail such as Fimia attributed to me. I stated ‘that I will need to see the e-mail.’”
The following day, O’Neill made a formal request for a copy of the e-mail. A total of five Public Record Act requests were made in following weeks pertaining to the e-mail, she said.
Complying with the request, Fimia provided a copy of the e-mail, but removed the “to” and “from” line in order to protect the sender from public exposure.
“Fimia believed she was producing the correct document,” according to the lawsuit.
Upon receiving the altered e-mail, the O’Neills informed city staff that they wanted the complete e-mail.
Fimia was then asked by city staff to provide the e-mail with the “to” header. She attempted to locate the original e-mail, but informed city staff that she was unable to locate it again, according to documents.
“I tried for about three hours to find where I may have put the e-mail. I do clean out my delete box frequently because I receive about 100 junk e-mails a day. Since I was unable to locate the e-mail, the only conclusion I could reach was that I had inadvertently deleted the e-mail,” stated Fimia in lawsuit documents.
Fimia then requested that the person who originally sent the e-mail to her, 32nd District Republican chairwoman Lisa Thwing, resend it to her e-mail account, according to documents. Shortly after, Fimia located the e-mail in her e-mail folders and a copy was provided to the O’Neills, along with the resent e-mail from Thwing.
“The e-mail which was provided to us … from Maggie Fimia through the city manager’s office is not sufficient, it is simply a piece of paper which could have been put together by anyone and called an e-mail. Further documentation is required in order to validate this document,” according to O’Neill’s statement.
The e-mail does not reveal the recipients of the e-mail as all recipients were blind carbon copied, according to documents.
Fimia also was asked to bring her home computer to the city, in order for staff to check for data pertaining to the original e-mail.
The city’s information services department completed a search of Fimia’s computer, but staff were unable to locate the original e-mail and concluded that it no longer existed on the computer. The original e-mail couldn’t be located in the city’s back-up system, as Fimia had received the e-mail on her private e-mail system. City staff then told the O’Neills that the original e-mail could not be retrieved, according to documents.
The lawsuit asks for access to the records, attorney fees, as well as a mandatory penalty of $5 to $100 for each day the law was violated, beginning Sept. 18.
Records are supposed to be “in the hands of the public,” said plaintiff attorney Michele Earl-Hubbard, who expects the case to proceed quickly in the next few months.
“There are a lot of incentives to resolve this as quickly as possible,” said Earl-Hubbard, referencing the imposed fine if violations occurred.
According to city attorney Ian Sievers, most of the documents requested by the O’Neills were essentially “the same thing in different ways,” regarding the e-mail. Each request was more detailed and more specific about desired information.
Except for a copy of the data pertaining to the original e-mail, copies of all requested documents, except two withheld as attorney-client privileged, were provided to the O’Neills, according to documents. Defendants state that a copy of the data from the original e-mail is not necessary as the e-mail was “preserved and copied.”
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