Open records discussion heats up at City Council

of eyebrows last week when she placed an unusual item on the council agenda. it called for the city to look into limiting the release of public records to people convicted of certain crimes. abc-7’s maria garcia is live with new details. from early on – mayor oscar leeser tried to delete the item from the agenda. saying he’d received a lot of emails from people concerned about it. “and that really bothered m that we would post something like that. and make the community feel we’re trying to hide behind the law.” “it would not appropriate for the city attorney to censor the council members and disallow them from placing an item on the agenda. however we did reach out to ms. acosta’s office.” as we reported friday, state law does not allow cities to withhold public records because of the requestor’s background. and her item centered around the release of records to people convicted of crimes of moral turpitude. but when the discussion began today – it took another turn. with acosta saying she didn’t want to limit public information but instead just wanted to redact phone numbers of constituents that may appear in the documents. she said many of these constituents don’t know their information is being released and someone could hack their phone. but that explanation didn’t convince blogger jaime abeytia who accused acosta of trying to shame or intimidate him for filing an open records request on her and her staff’s phone records: sot full “pthsi is no about the law. this is not about technology. those are cover words for what this is really about, an effort to try to embra the city attorney said the law currently does not allow cities to redact phone numbers from public records. but she said the city can work with its lobbyist to try to change state law so it can scratch of those phone numbers if they’re on public records. maria, live in our newsroom thank you. you can learn more about your access to government records, what’s public and what’s not. the freedom of information foundation and the texas a-g’s office will hold a seminar here in el paso on may 10… details on our website, kvia.com. a man who stabbed and killed his wife in 2014 learned his