UA Omits Key E-mail When Answering FOI Request

It may seem like we give the University of Arkansas administration a hard time now and then, but the powers-that-be keep giving us ammunition.

The latest episode involves an e-mail that recently surfaced regarding the UA’s interest in, and plans to finance, purchasing Fayetteville High School.

So what’s the big deal? We submitted a Freedom of Information Act request on Sept. 25, 2007, asking for all correspondence between UA staff and Board of Trustee members regarding FHS. The request specifically asked for documents about cost estimates.

The UA turned over several documents, including one from June 2006 that put a ballpark value of $25 million to $30 million on the 40-acre FHS campus.

The e-mail that wasn’t turned over to us in September, but was turned over three months later to community activist Jeff Erf in his own FOIA request, was written by UA Vice Chancellor Don Pederson on Aug. 29, 2007, addressed to UA system president B. Alan Sugg and copied to Chancellor John White and Vice Chancellor David Gearhart.

The e-mail laid out in detail how the university would finance the purchase of FHS with a tuition increase.

Pederson told Sugg, White and Gearhart that the UA’s debt service could be as high as $3.81 million over 30 years – that’s $114.3 million if you don’t have a calculator handy – and he laid out possible scenarios and schedules for how a tuition increase could be implemented to fund the purchase at its appraised value of around $60 million.

The point of contention arose not from Pederson’s failure to turn over this e-mail — after all, he did turn it over to Erf — but in his explanation for why he didn’t provide it to the Business Journal.

Pederson claimed that a) he had not retained a copy of the e-mail, b) he does not consider Sugg “staff” and therefore did not check with his office for any pertinent documents and c) he “did not recall” sending any information to Sugg.

As you might guess, none of these excuses held much water with us, and a second FOIA request has been filed to get to the bottom of what we feel are the UA’s hollow justifications. A simple “oops” from the UA would have left us nowhere to go, but as usual, they seem to want to do things the hard way.

Certainly the content of the Aug. 29 e-mail was the most pertinent of any document the UA possessed and goes a long way toward explaining why the matter wasn’t taken up at the Sept. 21 meeting of the Board of Trustees.

Much has changed since then, including the UA’s negotiating position with the Fayetteville School District, which took the cold shoulder treatment from the UA as a signal to move forward with plans to keep the school where it is.

The UA, through White and BOT member John Tyson, has expressed a sudden interest in reopening negotiations with Fayetteville and a willingness to consider paying a “premium” price. This after creating the impression in the fall it considered the price too high and the buildings unusable.

Stay tuned on this one.