Polk County official accused of violating public records law

The Iowa Public Information Board has charged Polk County Assessor Randy Ripperger with violating Iowa’s open records law.

Ripperger is accused of illegally denying public access to a list of 2,166 Polk County property owners who have had their names removed from the assessor’s website search engine, making it impossible for others to determine what properties those entities own through an online search of their name.

An IPIB attorney will be acting as the designated prosecutor in what is essentially an administrative proceeding, not a court trial. Either the board itself or an administrative law judge will preside over a June 21 hearing on the matter. The IPIB prosecutor is seeking an order directing Ripperger to disclose the list of property owners and pay unspecified damages for denying access.

In denying access to the list of names, Ripperger has cited a state law that allows governmental agencies to keep confidential certain communications from citizens that are “not required by law, rule, procedure, or contract.” The county’s written policy requires anyone wanting their name pulled from the website’s search engine to make a signed, written request to that effect — although Ripperger has acknowledged that policy is not always followed.

“We just have a disagreement here as to the interpretation of the law,” Ripperger said Thursday. “We feel the list is to be kept confidential and is not to be released for public inspection.”

According to Ripperger, there is no criteria for removing names from the assessor’s search engine, and his office grants every request for removal that it receives from property owners. Generally, he said, those property owners are public officials.

It’s not known how many of them are corporations, real estate investors or landlords, as opposed to individuals who want to keep their home address confidential.

The way the assessor’s search engine is configured now, the information it provides on such properties is not merely restricted, but potentially misleading. For example, a search for property owned by an entity whose name has been pulled from the search engine doesn’t produce a statement that says the information isn’t accessible.

Instead, the site reports that "zero records" exist under that name, as if the individual or company owns no property in Polk County. In reality, the website does contain records of properties held in that entity’s name, but the documents can be accessed only by searching under an address or parcel number.

In years past, the Polk County Assessor’s Office publicly disclosed the entities whose names were removed from the search engine. In late 2000, for example, there were 490 such property owners — mostly police officers, lawyers and judges.

In March 2017, the Des Moines Register asked Ripperger to provide access to the written requests filed by property owners who wanted their names pulled from the search engine or, in the alternative, a list of the 2,166 property owners whose names currently approved.

In response, Ripperger said his office had not retained copies of any of the requests. He also refused to produce a list of the property owners, noting that his office had promised requestors their names would be kept confidential.

The Register subsequently filed a complaint with IPIB, arguing in part that the assessor’s policy of promising confidentiality cannot override the state law that defines public records in Iowa.

The assessor’s office has acknowledged that property ownership is public information, and that when a person travels to the office in person and asks for a list of properties owned by any individual or corporation, the information is always disclosed, even in cases where the owner’s name has been pulled from the online search engine.

According to the assessor’s website, the process of exempting some property owners from the website’s name-search function is intended not to make the information confidential, but to make it harder to access. The process, the site says, is a response to “the concerns of those who do not want us to make it that easy for someone to find where they live.”

In the four and a half years IPIB has existed, it has prosecuted only two other cases involving alleged violations of the open records law:

• In May 2014, Washington County Attorney Larry Brock was charged with violating the law by taking three months to respond to a public-records request. An administrative law judge ruled that Brock should be fined $1,000.
• In May 2016, the Burlington Police Department, Des Moines County Attorney Amy Beavers and the Iowa Department of Public Safety’s Division of Criminal Investigation were charged with illegally denying access to records related to a police shooting. A hearing in that case is scheduled for May 16.