MEMPHIS, Tenn. — It was almost as if Mayor A C Wharton was surprised when WREG revealed the city’s $4.5-million police body camera contract was not posted online.
“It’s not — umm. Get it — we’ll get it up right away,” Mayor Wharton said.
“It seems like they have something to hide, right? I mean that’s the connotation,” Alex Robertson said.
All of this after WREG questioned the mayor on his campaign manager’s nearly $900,000 contract to market body cameras.
According to the city, a website was created to “provide transparency” in government and hold “all contracts and purchase orders” since 2009.
“I’d like to see all the workings of the government — contracts, meeting minutes and everything that we can possibly get so we can know what’s going on,” Robertson explained.
WREG scrolled through dozens of postings on the city’s contract website and uncovered that contracts, awarding thousands of dollars of tax money, were not there.
Instead, only purchase orders are posted on the web.
WREG called the city’s Office of Contract Compliance to see what the deal was.
The office said to receive a copy of a contract, an open records request had to be submitted.
“You have to make the request; and then you have to wait for them to respond to the request,” Steve Mulroy, with the University of Memphis Law School, explained. “It would be a lot easier if all you had to do is go to the website and click on a button.”
Mulroy, a former Shelby County Commissioner, said the change in public contract postings sends the wrong message about transparency.
“I mean there’s really no reason that information couldn’t be available to anyone who wants it with the click of a button in the Internet age. We knew that because they had to have that on the website. Now the fact that they’re taking it away I think shows a deliberate attempt to hide information from the public,” Mulroy said.
The city said it would make it’s body camera contract public on the website on Tuesday.
The city is not required by law to post these records online — only to provide them upon request.