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Photo by David Robinson, FOIArkansas Project Robert Fisher

Ombudsman providing counsel on FOIA

Elizabeth Caldwell, FOIArkansas Project

Attorneys general come and go; but the outspoken Robert Fisher provides a constant in the Arkansas attorney general’s office. For almost 20 years, he has been there, fielding questions about the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act.

FOIArkansas----------------Unlocking the public's business

An ombudsman for the office, Fisher keeps all court rulings and legal opinions on the FOI law at his fingertips — where they’ve been since 1980.

As a weekly newspaper publisher, Fisher had worked with fellow Arkansas journalists to get the FOI law passed in 1967. He was called on in the late 1970s by a young Bill Clinton, then attorney general, to help publish the first handbook on the FOI Act. Clinton’s successor, Steve Clark, put Fisher to work full time.

Fisher, 76, has long encouraged his bosses to provide an FOI hotline for reporters covering city council or quorum court meetings.

Those calls have slacked off since the media is so much more educated on the law, Fisher said. So he now finds himself answering more questions from public officials, especially just after an election cycle.

He doesn’t hesitate to speak his mind.

One shortcoming of the FOI law, according to Fisher, is an amendment that allows some personnel records to be off limits.

“They put in the nonsense about job performance records. It really clouded the Act. To me, it really didn’t gut it, but it sure gave it a hit in a tender spot,” Fisher said.

Fisher also believes government offices charge too much for photocopies. The attorney general’s office has stuck with its 1988 opinion that the custodian of the records may charge a reasonable fee for photocopies and that 25 cents a page is not unreasonable.

“That’s fine if you just want one or two copies. But even 25 cents, I don’t think, can be justified ...,” Fisher said. Taxpayer money pays salaries and buys copying machines, he said.

“I think just as a matter of principle, that the public should not have to be taxed twice for something that is legitimately theirs in the first place,” he said.

Rep. Sue Madison, D-Fayetteville, called on him in the 1997 session for advice about legislation to set copying charges at 10 cents a page, Fisher said. The measure was defeated.

“The people who beat it primarily are some of these public agencies that have figured out they make money off the FOI,” Fisher said.

Fisher believes the charge should be 5 cents a page or less.

Fisher wins high praise from those who regularly call on him and work with him.

“The wonderful thing about Bob is he has been a constant in that office,” said Milton Scott of Benton, a lobbyist for the Arkansas Press Association. When an issue arises, “the chances are pretty good that Bob has already come across that situation.”

Perrin Jones of Little Rock, consumer specialist with the attorney general’s office and former editor of the The Daily Citizen in Searcy, says Fisher has had a tremendous effect on the FOI law.

“He has been outspoken on it,” Jones said, and in the campaign to get the law passed, “was involved all the way through, twisting arms.”

Fisher grew up in a newspaper family in Topeka, Kan., and owned and worked at newspapers in Nebraska and Arkansas.

He left the newspaper business to go to work for Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller, who had signed the FOI Act into law.

“People with any kind of a memory of Arkansas politics recall what it was like before we had an FOI,” Fisher said. He recalled that people were arrested when Rockefeller sent them to county courthouses to look at voter registration records.

Fisher returned to his newspaper roots, but in 1980 he sold the last weekly he owned and “just to be doing something, I went to work for (Attorney General) Steve Clark,” he said.

He started by handling public relations, but the job soon grew into fielding questions from constituents and FOI questions from journalists.

“I have to be real careful that I don’t practice law, because I’m not a lawyer, but we do share information with people,” Fisher said.

He normally takes 40 to 50 calls a day and handles eight to 10 faxes. About 50 percent of his time was FOI-related in the early days. Now, it’s about 10 percent.

“I think the media’s far better educated. And they have the (FOI) book in newsrooms,” he said. “They’re just a lot more knowledgeable about it now than they were 10 or 15 years ago.”

While Clark was attorney general, Fisher often traveled the state holding FOI seminars.

“We tried to explain how vital it is for the people, if they’re going to make intelligent decisions, to have knowledge to support those decisions. And that’s what the FOI does,” Fisher said.

The FOI law is designed “not to embarrass their public officials and not to gather evidence to put them in jail, but to go in and find out the facts, find out where their taxes go and why. And this is all information they’re entitled to,” he said.

When Winston Bryant was elected attorney general in 1990, Fisher took a less public role and the seminars were handled by attorneys.

Fisher remains a staunch defender of the people’s right to government documents.

“The law doesn’t say what reason you have to have to ask for it and it doesn’t say ‘give a rationale for what you’re going to do with it,’” he said. “The law just says (if) it’s a public record, (and if) you’re a citizen of the state of Arkansas, you’re entitled to it.”

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