Florida Statute 119.0701 governing public agency contracts requires that all contracts for services entered into with contractors to the agency contain a clause governing public records and public records requests. That law has been in place since 2013 — it was expanded and given more teeth in 2016.
Yet none of the services contracts between Hillsborough County Public Schools (HCPS) and its service providers that the Guardian has reviewed comply with this state law.
This failure to comply extends to the HCPS’s contracts with Horus Construction Services, a vendor to HCPS that is alleged to have provided private jet travel to HCPS’s superintendent Van Ayres and and purchasing director Chris Farkas. The Guardian broke this news last Friday.
In order to give HCPS an opportunity to respond to our findings, we contacted both HCPS Communication and HCPS’ General Counsel Jeffrey Gibson at the Gray Robinson law firm and asked if HCPS is of the opinion that Florida Statute 119.0701 does not govern its contracts with its service providers? We had received no response by our publication deadline.
Not including a contract clause required by Florida law for over 11 years raises questions, but also has negative implications for government accountability.
“Horus Construction is not obligated to respond to your current request,” wrote Robert Edwards II in an email to us. Edwards is an attorney representing Horus and was responding to our public records request made directly request to Horus on August 9th.
Edwards was apparently only brought in last week by Horus to respond to our records request. Edwards responded more than 5 weeks after we made our initial records request, and after repeating the request a second time.
Since the public records request clause required by Florida law (Florida Statutes 119.0701) is not in Horus’ contract with HCPS, they can claim ignorance, and tell us that our public records request “should be directed to a public agency” — which is exactly what Edwards did.
The failure to include the public records request clause isn’t the first sign of HCPS struggling with public records law comprehension.
In response to our August 9th records request, HCPS provided the records only after two weeks and then only some of them.
HCPS Custodian of Public Records Tanya Arja claimed that the reason that the bulk of records had not been provided was because “an incomplete file was previously uploaded to the Sharefile (sic).” HCPS uses a product called Sharepoint, not Sharefile.
We never received the cell phone logs of the Ayres and Farkas that we requested covering the period of the alleged private jet travel, so we have requested the again.
Arja also initially claimed that HCPS “does not have a single custodian of records given the multiple departments throughout the district. Accordingly, the HCPS Communications Department handles the intake of all public records requests and works with the multiple records custodians throughout the district to fulfill each public records request.”
Via email, we pointed out to Arja that “custodian of public records” is a term defined by Florida Statute 119.011 and that HCPS must have one person designated as such. Arja then wrote us to “apologize for any confusion my prior correspondence may have caused. As the head of the Communications Department, I am the Custodian of Public Records for the Hillsborough County School District.”
There was no confusion at our end, but is there confusion about the Florida Public Records law at HCPS? Or is it incompetence — or something else?
As always….the Guardian reports and the readers decide. Please like our Facebook page to find out when we publish new stories.
