This is an opinion column.

Lucille Sherman set out to answer a question: Were midwives filling the gaps in rural healthcare, where hospitals can be an hour or more away and OB/GYN’s aren’t available to deliver babies?

Sherman is a national reporter with Gatehouse Media, which owns about 150 newspapers across the country, including the Tuscaloosa News, and she was particularly interested in Alabama, which legalized midwifery again last year and recently issued licenses to at least five midwives.

Sherman wanted to make sure her reporting was accurate and her information current, so she submitted what should have been a simple public information request to the Alabama State Board of Midwifery.

She asked for the current data, including — crucially — the mailing addresses of licensed midwives. (It’s hard to know whether midwives are filling the gaps in rural healthcare if you don’t know where they work.)

And that’s where her adventure in Alabama’s banal bureaucracy began.

Bettie Carmack, a lawyer with the Alabama Attorney General’s Office, sent Sherman a form to fill out. Request forms for public records are not unusual, but this one was of a kind I’d never seen before, nor had Sherman and her editors.

First, the form required a $10 per hour research fee, with a minimum charge of $10, no matter if the research took an hour or five minutes.

This happens a lot.

Second, it required a minimum $50 per hour legal review fee, with a minimum charge of $50, no matter if the legal review took five minutes.

Sherman was looking at $60 with no clear limit for how high those fees could go.

Could it be $100? Maybe. Or $5,000? Who knows?

In a 1998 opinion, then-Attorney General Bill Pryor said this very thing — demanding legal fees from the public for reviewing public records requests — was illegal. But hey, today he’s only a federal judge on the 11th Circuit and on every Republican president’s short list for the United States Supreme Court, so what does he know?

But here’s where the stupidity of Alabama bureaucracy reached a new level: Before Sherman could know the price was for these documents, the form required her to agree to pay for this pig in a poke.

There’s more.

You ever been asked to waive your homestead and personal property exemptions just to get a public record? Me neither. Yet here we are. https://t.co/s0OwShPprm — Emily Le Coz (@emily_lecoz) March 25, 2019

And not only did Sherman have to agree to pay an unknown price, but she also had to waive rights to things like her homestead exemption if she refused to pay — because if she didn’t pay, they promised to sue her in a venue of their choosing.

Jim Pewitt, a Birmingham attorney with almost 30 years experience in media law and open records cases said that was a new one to him.

“You add the fees to this business with waiving your rights to your the homestead exemptions, and it begins to look very quickly like you’re trying to dissuade a public records request,” he said.

Finally, Carmack informed Sherman that, even if she consented to all that hullabaloo, the state would not give her the mailing addresses of the midwives — the very thing Sherman needed in the first place.

In Alabama, if a public official refuses to release public information to you, that official is supposed to be able to cite an exemption from the Open Records Act. Sherman asked Carmack to cite the exemption, but Carmack — a lawyer in the state office that’s supposed to enforce Alabama law — refused.

“She told me you can file a lawsuit if you want addresses,” Sherman said.

I wrote Carmack to find out who the heck came up with this form.

“I did,” she wrote back.

I then wrote to Carmack to give her an opportunity to answer a long list of questions for this column.

She declined to do so.

To understand how completely arbitrary and inane Carmack’s obstinance is, consider this: Sherman submitted a nearly identical request to the Alabama Board of Nursing for the names and addresses of certified nurse midwives. She got that information from that state agency for free — no resistance, no silly form, no pig-headed state lawyer digging in her heels.

“It’s a ridiculously easy ask,” Sherman’s editor, Emily Le Coz, told me. “For them to throw that much resistance and red tape in our way is concerning.”

But in Alabama, access to public records has little to do with law and everything to do with the whims of one capricious bureaucrat over another.

Here’s the thing I’ll record on tape so, with a little help, I can keep saying it even after I’m dead: Public records are the only tools the public has to hold its public officials accountable.

And when public officials are keeping those records from you — the law be damned — they aren’t serving your interests.

Only theirs.

Kyle Whitmire is the state political columnist for the Alabama Media Group.

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