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YOUSOUFIAN v. SIMS TO WASHINGTON SUPREME COURT Armen Yousoufian's six year struggle to obtain documents from the King County Executive, Ron Sims, under public disclosure requests will wind up in the Washington Supreme Court during the 2004 Winter Term. Following Yousoufian's successful suit in 2001, the trial court and court of appeals, while recognizing that King County "egregiously mishandled" Yousoufian's request for documents related to the proposal to build a new Seattle football stadium and failed to act in good faith, nevertheless entered rulings that seriously detract from the Washington Public Disclosure Act's (PDA) intended effect. Washington's Public Disclosure Act (RCW 42.17.250), enacted to ensure citizen access to public records, states that where a person prevails in seeking disclosure of any public record, the person is entitled to "no less than $5 per day and no greater than $100 per day for each day that the person was denied access to the record." However, both trial and appellate courts in ruling on Yousoufian v. Sims arbitrarily grouped 166 records together into 18 "documents" for the purpose of assessing penalties. This arbitrary grouping of records reduced the penalty to King County to only $25,440 plus some attorney's fees … in spite of the fact that many of the records were withheld from Yousoufian for 1,463 days. "This decision, if allowed to stand, will extract the teeth from our State's public disclosure act," according to Yousoufian's attorney, Michael G. Brannan. "The PDA is supposed to be a self-enforcing remedial statute with a maximum deterrent effect brought about by strict enforcement of its punitive provisions. Unless the penalties for non-compliance with legitimate requests for records are significant enough to matter to the agency, agencies may decide to pay a minimal fine rather than obey the law!" In May of 1997, Armen Yousoufian, Managing Partner of Seattle's University Plaza Hotel, heard King County Executive Ron Sims refer to studies suggesting that demolition of the Kingdome and construction of a new Seattle football stadium with tax dollars made economic sense. Weeks before the June 17, 1997 vote on Referendum 48, which authorized demolition of the Kingdome and construction of the new stadium, Yousoufian filed a request for records under the State's Public Disclosure Act. King County did not cooperate. The County did not produce the records As requested, but released only a trickle of largely irrelevant documents before the election, and not many more after. According to Yousoufian, "I got stonewalled." A few records trickled out after the election. In March of 2000, Yousoufian filed suit. According to attorney Brannan, "The county continually said to Armen, 'You have all the documents.' Then we filed a lawsuit and lo and behold the county produced documents it said it didn't have. Then their lawyer said in open court there were no more documents to produce, so we pushed a little harder and, lo and behold, out came yet more documents." Most disturbing was that King County to date has produced almost no items of correspondence between the County and Football Northwest, Paul Allen's organization which discussed promotion and construction of the proposed new stadium -- documents that Yousoufian feels certain exist. Brannan continued, "As it stands, Yousoufian v. Sims creates a tremendous disincentive to ordinary citizens who have been wrongfully denied access to records; 'their' records. Few citizens have the resources to challenge an agency in court because they will be competing with an agency's well-funded legal team." The petition for review, granted by the Supreme Court of Washington on September 30, 2003, was aggressively opposed by King County Prosecuting Attorney Norm Maleng, but supported with Amicus Curiae briefs from the Allied Daily Newspapers of Washington, the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association, the Building Industry Association of Washington, the Seattle Neighborhood Association, and Citizens for a Livable Northgate. The complete text of Yousoufian's petition to the Washington State Supreme Court is available online. The complete archive of information is available at Mr. Yousoufian's Website.
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