After working for three years as Arizona’s assistant attorney general in the civil division, Elizabeth Hill joined the Arizona Ombudsman Citizens’ Aide last February. As assistant ombudsman for public access, Hill assists citizens’ complaints against not just state agencies, but most matters of public access.
The Arizona Capitol Times spoke with Hill to find out what her new role entails, how she’s handling the job and even how to correctly pronounce ombudsman (awm-budz-men).
For someone who has never heard of the term ombudsman, explain your role.
The role of an ombudsman is that of a problem solver or a mediator. Someone who receives complaints and just tries to resolve them efficiently, formally and basically come up with the most fair and appropriate outcome or resolution for both the complainant as well as the government agency they’re complaining about.
Historically, the agency has only dealt with complaints received from constituents regarding state agencies, so our jurisdiction was only for state departments. Last legislative session they put into place this position, my position, which is basically a public access counselor. They authorized Pat Shannahan (Ombudsman-Citizens’ Aide) to hire an attorney and one other person to help handle calls coming in regarding matters of public access, meaning open-meeting law and public records.
How do you maintain objectivity?
It’s really just like a judge would do in a judicial position where you get facts from both sides, you hear the complainant’s view of things and you talk to the agency involved and get their point of view. Just take an independent and impartial look at it. And of course, taking into consideration the statutes, the rules, that agency’s particular policies and procedures.
For public records a lot of it is either someone has been outright denied access to a public record, or they’ve just been ignored. So in that case a lot of times it’s easily resolved first of all by contacting the right person. Part of my job, of course, is figuring out who is the right point of contact. A lot of times their response is, “What? What request?” It just either got put on the wrong desk or it was a complete misunderstanding, or they’ve been so busy and haven’t gotten to it. And that’s not the right answer, but at least now we know what’s going on and we can try to fix the problem.
It’s really just taking an objective look, just coming at it from an impartial standpoint. We’re not an advocate for the citizen and we’re not a defender for the agency.
Does it make it difficult that you’re paid by the state and some of the complaints are obviously against state agencies?
No. I don’t even think about that. I’ve been hired for a specific purpose and even though I’m paid by the state, they’ve hired me to be an independent and impartial reviewer of these issues, and that is my job, that is what I’m being paid for.
About how many calls do you get each day?
Each day it’s hard to say. It varies so much. Some days I’ll get none, some days I’ll get six. I can give you an overall idea. I just printed this for our semi-annual report. To date, 142 inquiries. That’s broken down by the types of calls. In general, about 107 of those were regarding public record matters and about 35 were regarding open meetings. Thirty-two of the inquiries came from government agencies themselves so a lot of our business and a lot of our role is counseling and assisting the public bodies themselves.
And they’ll actually call us and ask, “What do you think about this? What should I do in this situation?” Because they want to do things correctly, so they want to see what is the ombudsman’s opinion on that because they don’t want to do something and have a complaint come in.
What agency gathers the most complaints?
Right now I haven’t had very many duplicates. I hate to say it because I don’t want any agency to feel like they’re being singled out. We did have a couple regarding the Register of Contractors. It’s pretty widespread. There is thousands and thousands of public bodies in the state of Arizona so it’s been pretty diverse. I’ve seen a couple of Motor Vehicle Division (complaints). But keep in mind that the complainant is the same each time.
What do you think is the biggest misconception about public documents?
Well I would say one of the biggest problems is the imposition of fees. I think a lot of agencies still think they can charge for the time for retrieving and searching for the records, but they cannot. I think that’s still a common myth out there. I think people take some of the exceptions to the disclosure and they try to apply a blanket rule. There have been cases when yes, internal investigation documents were not required to be disclosed…but that’s not a blanket. The courts have never applied a blanket exception. In cases like that, it really is case by case. You have to look at the best interest and privacy issues.
What is it about the role of an ombudsman that confuses people?
I would say other than getting our jurisdictions sorted out, you know, what kind of issues we can handle for what sort of agencies, the next on confusion is that we’re not an advocate for them. We’re not their lawyer. Just because they call us doesn’t mean we’re going to agree with them.
How is your prior experience as an assistant attorney general in the Civil Division influencing your work here?
It’s so different. I guess the positive thing about it is that having worked with the Department of Revenue and some of the other agencies I have a better understanding of the inner workings of agencies and the navigation tools to contact the right people. If I don’t know who to call, there’s usually someone I call to find out who to call.