The Republican challenger to Columbus Mayor Jim Lienhoop in the May 7 primary said he believes the current administration has not acted in a transparent manner.
“The mayor should be transparent,” said challenger Glenn Petri.
However, Lienhoop said the claim is politically motivated and not grounded in fact.
One of Petri’s main criticisms is that information is not easily accessible to the public and involves filling out public information requests forms that makes the process more cumbersome.
“There’s only a few things that should not be released to the public,” Petri said. Personnel issues should remain private, and some financial issues should be for a period of time. “Everything else should be posted or made available,” Petri said.
Petri cited lengthy delays in receiving public information he requested from the city. “My personal feeling, I’m not getting what I want because there’s something in there they don’t want me to see,” he said.
The Lienhoop administration instituted the public information requests to keep track of the requests being made by former mayor Kristen Brown, who Lienhoop defeated in the May 2015 GOP primary, and her supporters over the past four years. In 2018, the Lienhoop administration disbanded several subcommittees after open meetings complaints were filed by Brown and others.
In October 2016, Lienhoop took the unprecedented step of reading a statement accusing Brown and some of her backers of abusing the public access process. Lienhoop said at the time that Brown and her supporters had filed dozens of public information requests with the city and also filed complaints with Indiana Public Access Counselor Luke Britt.
Brown filed a public access lawsuit against the city involving the Columbus Police Department and earlier this year filed another complaint with Britt, also involving records at the police department.
Petri said his goal as mayor would be that no official public records requests would be required. “Everyone down there at City Hall is servants to the people, and the people are not servants to them,” he said.
Lienhoop offered a different view on the transparency criticisms leveled at his administration.
“I think the criticisms they’ve raised are pretty much politically motivated and are not really grounded in fact,” the mayor said.
One of the reasons critics can complain as much as they do, Lienhoop said, is because they know everything the city is doing, which means the city has been open and transparent.
“We get it right 95 percent of the time, and the other time I’m not sure we’re wrong, but there may be a difference of opinion as to how we ought to do this or that,” Lienhoop said.
One criticism of Lienhoop in regard to transparency has been acknowledgement that he and his staff meet with individual city council members in private for briefings.
Lienhoop said those are briefing sessions that give council members an opportunity to understand issues and ask for specific info and data that will help them make their final decision. That also serves the purpose of keeping city council meetings efficient so decisions are not delayed longer than needed.
Lienhoop said he believes he and the council have acted in a way that hasn’t left residents failing to understand why they made a certain decision.
“The whole notion about having public discussion is so that the public understands why we’ve decided to do what we’re deciding to do. I’ve never found a situation where somebody comes back to me afterwards and says, ‘Why did you do that?’” Lienhoop said.
