By Tasha Cook
The lawsuit filed in October by a former student along with the Student Press Law Center (SPLC) against the college was voluntarily dismissed Dec. 1.
The SPLC, along with former student Marcus Clem, sued the college earlier this fall after the college tried to charge several thousand dollars to retrieve emails requested by members of the Campus Ledger last spring. The majority of the emails were public records due to the Kansas Open Records Act (KORA). The cost of the emails was reduced from around $47,000 to around $450 after the SPLC lessened the requested number of emails.
“Maybe [Clem’s] lawyer realized there was some need to narrow, and I think we found a good solution,” said President Terry Calaway in regards to Clem’s lawyer Christopher Grentz. “We responded to the requests.
“Once they saw that the college never had any interest or intention of doing anything other than getting the information to him that he was looking for… they realized there was no reason for a lawsuit.”
However, Clem said the college is trying to use language to make it seem as though they won.
“The college is taking advantage of legal terminology, the specifics of which the common man on the street doesn’t understand, to put the best possible spin on what can only be classified as a major forced compromise on their part, at best,” he said in a comment on Facebook, a social networking website. “If there’s some other way to honestly characterize a reduction in price by a factor of 100, I’d like to know what it is.”
Executive vice president of Administrative Services Joe Sopcich said the SPLC decided to dismiss on its own.
“I would think usually when someone dismisses their own lawsuit, perhaps once they got into the facts of the case it was determined that it wouldn’t merit further pursuit, who knows,” he said.
Sopcich said the only reason the college decreased the amount of money it requested is due to the substantial decrease in the amount of emails requested.
“In the process, both parties sat down and they worked out a resolution where the college provided, on a much more very narrow scope from what was originally asked, some email correspondence,” he said.
Some emails were still protected from open records laws, and this was due to personnel matters, Calaway said.
“The law does allow us to protect and redact information,” he said. “I’ve never seen any of the emails or have no clue what any of them say, we never did know. If there was something that was redacted it probably was the protection of some kind of personnel matter. The law is pretty clear and specific on that.
“We were always open to whatever it was he was asking for, it was just a matter of ‘here, here’s what our cost would be,’ and we shouldn’t spend taxpayer money for a ‘fishing expedition’ which is what [Clem] described it as in one of his earlier meetings. We have always done exactly what the law and our procedure says we should do, and we did that exactly in this case too.”
Contact Tasha Cook, managing editor, at tcook15@jccc.edu.
See Joe Sopcich’s related letter to the editor here.
See Marcus Clem’s related letter to the editor here.
“Who knows?” Does Dr. Sopcich really expect that sentiment, given how much time and effort has been put into this case on the part of both sides, to be taken seriously?
One would hope so, given that’s what he said to a reporter on the record, but that little status of affairs hasn’t stopped the college from tripping over their own words before.
Still, the notion that Sopcich isn’t aware of every detail of the negotiations surrounding an unprecedented lawsuit that directly involved his department, is just laughable. It is even if you wish to believe every word he said — because if he is speaking honestly, and he really doesn’t know why we backed off, then he hasn’t been paying attention to the case at all.
We’ve explicitly told them why.