Meet Patrick Shannahan, Arizona’s first and only ombudsman-citizens’ aide; appointed July 1, 1996. The office was created to handle citizen complaints and inquiries about state government and its agencies, boards and commissions. The role of Mr. Shannahan and his four-person staff varies according to the type of gripes or questions received. One moment they can serve as a teacher informing people of their rights, another as a coach directing a citizen to a particular office or employee, and at other times they must be investigators or even negotiators — an area where Mr. Shannahan is well-versed.
After two decades serving in the Army as a field artilleryman and war college professor, the former Sun Devil helped negotiate multi-national treaties to end the proliferation of nuclear and chemical weapons.
His time serving in Germany during the Cold War is over, as well as his days representing the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the White House. Now he’s much more likely to be intervening in citizens’ minor disputes with government agencies or sometimes major collisions between parents and Child Protective Services.
He recently sat down with Arizona Capitol Times to discuss government authority, communications mishaps and the threats to children in the state of Arizona.
Your resume is loaded with military experience, including bargaining work on high-stakes non-proliferation of weapons treaties. How has that prepared you for your job?
I had a chance to watch some very experienced diplomats negotiate some very difficult treaties. From watching them I learned a lot about negotiating and a lot about compromising. I learned a lot about doing things for the greater good and that’s a big part of what we do as the ombudsman.
That sort of work involved the coordinating of strategy between government bodies like the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, and the National Security Council — agencies not particularly known for their talkativeness. Are you most likely to side with the state?
No. I think if you look at what we do, the idea of having an ombudsman is having somebody who is neutral, impartial and independent. We’re the ones who are supposed to take what people say with a grain of salt. I look at the complaint and what they are saying with a critical eye and I look at what the agency says with a critical eye. The point of having us in the legislative branch, instead of the executive branch, is to give us the independence to do that. In other words I can say something that one of these big agency directors doesn’t want to hear and my parking space is not going to change. They don’t affect my resources and they can’t fire me. We have the independence to say that. Now I’m being paid by the government so people can say, ‘Well, he’s being paid by the government, so he probably sides with the government.’ But that’s not the case. I’m appointed for a five-year term by the Legislature and during the course of that term it takes a two-thirds majority vote in both houses to fire me, which gives me the independence to express what I really feel. I think we try to do an honest, independent evaluation. Sometimes we think the agency did right and sometimes they did wrong. I think statistically — about 75 percent of the time we determine the agency acted appropriately and about 25 percent we think they did something wrong. But a lot of times we try to solve it without making that sort of finding.
In your experience, do people generally keep their promises?
Yeah. Are you talking about government people?
People in general.
Yes. I think if you’re dealing with government you have to be careful about what they’re promising. In other words, a lot of times what we see is a miscommunication. A citizen and government agency are talking and having a conversation and then they go away and each has a different idea of what was said and what was agreed to. A lot of times what we do is go back and try to straighten out that miscommunication. In my experiences, if people promise to do something, they’ll do it. But you have to be careful that they are really promising to do what you think they’re promising, because sometimes there is a misunderstanding. When citizens come to us, what we see is what they will tell us is the truth. They won’t lie to us, well, sometimes they do. But normally they don’t, but they’re going to tell us their side of the story and tell us facts, which support their position. We talk to the agency and we get the other half of the story and they’re going to tell us about things that support their position. The truth is probably someplace in the middle.
The office of the Arizona Ombudsman/Citizens’ Aide has no authority to force an agency to follow recommendations that your office may make. Is this authority needed?
No. What I found is for the most part agencies cooperate with us if I can go to the agency and say ‘this is what I found,’ and present the agency with facts that show that they are doing something wrong. The vast majority of the time agencies are very cooperative with us. I would not want to see it (the office) have the authority to compel the agencies to do something because it would have too much power. Right now the office I think is in balance. We have the authority to do an investigation based on a citizen’s complaint. That is powerful to be able to do that. But on the back end, I can’t tell them to do anything. All I can say is ‘hey, you guys listen up, here’s what you’re doing wrong,’ and try to convince them to change it. If they don’t, I write a report that goes to the governor, to the Legislature, to the public and stuff like that. If both of those powers were in the same office, I wouldn’t abuse it because I’m a good guy. But I think the potential would be there for abuse.
This year, two bills were signed that directly impact your line of work — one, S1407 by Senator Burns, expands the jurisdiction of your office to include cities, counties, municipalities and school districts, how is your office preparing for this larger role?
We don’t start doing that until the first of the year, so right now we’re doing preliminary work. I have gone to a seminar on public records law, talked with folks from the Attorney General’s Office about it. We’re in the process of getting our case management system updated to include the extra stuff that we have to do for this. We’re talking to our landlord — we need more space. We’re doing the logistics and probably in early December I’ll start putting the notices in the paper to recruit the two people who are supposed to do this. I’ll have two more people onboard with offices, telephones, computers and all that stuff and having them get started on all the work that needs to be done.
Another, S1225, by Senator Martin establishes that a court may order attorney fees of a requestor of public records be paid by an agency if it is found they improperly withheld information. However, it’s not as if employees of an agency will be paying for this out of their pockets, but it is more likely the expenses will come from the agency’s budget. Is this a real deterrent?
That’s not an issue that we’ve been dealing with. That’s an issue for the courts to award attorney’s fees. That increases the costs of an agency. If they go to court and lose there’s the chance that they would have to pay attorneys fees as well. That would encourage them to not take something to court that they think they are going to lose. One of the strategies is: ‘We’ll take this to court. We’re the government. We can afford a whole office full of assistant attorney generals and this poor citizen out there is not going to have the resources to fight us in court, so we won’t provide the documents. We’ll make them take us to court. And they won’t do it.’ But, if they (citizens) win and they (the agency) has to pay the attorney’s fees, then that makes it a bigger deal for them. If the citizen requests documents and they have a legitimate right, it will encourage them (agencies) to be more accommodating. And that’s a good thing, as to providing access to the public of government records, and it will encourage agencies to be more open.
Agencies obviously have an incentive to withhold information that could be seen as politically inconvenient, embarrassing, or in some cases, could damage the careers of those involved. When is it necessary to impede free access to government records?
There are two ways of looking at this. One way is to say that ‘this is the universe of information and this and this and this is public information and the rest we keep secret.’ That is the way many government bureaucrats look at it. A better picture is to say ‘this is the information and this and this and this are withheld, but everything else is public.’ The default position is that all information is public, unless there is something in the law that makes that information not public. My office gets access to virtually all records with a few exceptions. In other words, there are some things that are withheld. For example, a person’s tax records are withheld unless someone gets power of attorney from that person. Someone’s medical records are withheld. A person’s psychological records are withheld. You cannot decline a public records request because that information would embarrass you. Some agencies probably try to do that. The agency has to be able to identify a reason for declining to accommodate a public records request. And, as of the first of the year (when S1407 goes into effect), they are supposed to provide an inventory of what they refused to provide and to state the reason why they are refusing it.
What is the most egregious abuse of public records laws that you have ever seen?
It’s the State Department of Transportation. We had a company who was a contractor and they contracted for the roadway vegetation; the seeding of grass and putting plants besides highways. They submitted a public records request for the Department of Transportation to look at documents about contracts of other companies, contracts with the big road builders, and contracts about the rationale of how the department came up with seed mixes and so on. It was a pretty extensive request. ADOT didn’t respond to that for two years. They went back and forth and we got involved. Eventually what we had to do because ADOT couldn’t compile the information — one of our people went out to five of the district offices throughout the state to look at the records. We made that available to the people who made the request. They were satisfied, but it took over two years. That was egregious because it took so long and they weren’t responsive to the request.
But we haven’t gotten into a lot of public access complaints. I don’t have a whole lot of case history here to fall back on. I don’t know enough about it. See me in a year.
Much of your work, judging by the 2005 annual report, is handling complaints with Child Protective Services and CPS enforcement related issues. What is your opinion on the overall state of children’s safety in Arizona?
I think CPS is doing a lot better today than they were five or ten years ago. I think the program has gotten a lot of scrutiny by the media, the Governor’s Office and the Legislature. They have done a lot of reforms internally. I think for the most part the people doing the work are trying to do it well and protect children and families. I think the procedures that are in place are for the most part, sound and logical. It doesn’t mean that it is a great system or it’s perfect. We have a situation where we have two fundamental rights that come into conflict. One is the right of a parent to discipline his or her children; to raise his or her children. And the second is the right of a child not to be abused. And when those things come into conflict we put in a government worker that is overworked, may be inexperienced and we put them right in the middle of that. And when you make the decision to remove a child from the parents that’s a big deal. It requires constant oversight and a number of times the person doing it could have done better and those are the type of things we try to look at. The problem with it, if you look at it from the outside, it looks like it’s pretty clear cut: the kid is being abused, let’s take the kid out of the house and let’s deal with it. But what happens is that it is very subjective and when we first started I tried to say ‘listen; let’s make this as objective as we can, let’s go over some clear criteria.’ But you can’t. Every case is different. Every family is different. The relationships between the people, the aunts, the uncles, the neighbors, the kids, the siblings, all that stuff is different and unique to that family and that situation.
I think for the most part the people doing the job are trying to do a good job for the families and the procedures are good and sound. The problem is putting this into very subjective crisis situations and they’re trying to do the right thing all the time. Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn’t.
The biggest issue affecting child welfare is drugs. At least 80 percent of the cases we look at there involve drugs, primarily methamphetamine. The methamphetamine crisis affects other things in our society, but I think it is affecting children the most. That addiction is strong enough to break down the ties between a mother and a child. We have women that are taking meth a week before they have their child, knowing how harmful it is to an unborn child. We got kids on drugs raids; they take the children out of the house where the meth lab is and the kids’ clothes have to be burned and destroyed as toxic waste because of the chemicals in them. We have kids abandoned, neglected. We had one mother — I’m sure there’s more — that was prostituting her 14-year-old daughter to get money for her habit. It changes their minds and a parent’s natural desire to protect and nurture their children. It’s a crisis. If you are talking child welfare in the state of Arizona, I think the worst thing is methamphetamine. It’s drugs.

Thank you for your time.
You’re welcome.