Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, July 5, 1994 TAG: 9407050104
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAN CASEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
When Roanoke City Attorney Wilburn Dibling sent a Freedom of Information Act request to the U.S. Department of Justice in May 1981, his hair was thick and dark and his eldest child was finishing first grade.
Last month, Dibling finally got the documents he sought. By now he's going bald and what's left on his head is snow-white. His firstborn just completed her sophomore year of college. The deputy attorney general who was handling the request has retired after a long career in government service.
"I didn't expect an immediate response, but I didn't expect it to take 13 years, either," Dibling says today. "I would have expected [it] to take as long as six months."
The subject of the inquiry was the Ku Klux Klan, which back then was readying plans for a march in downtown Roanoke. The racist organization applied to the city for a parade permit in April 1981.
In the early 1980s, Klan activity across the country was on an upswing. Mayhem seemed to follow the group everywhere its members raised their white hoods. Klan rallies spawned shootings, beatings and counter-demonstrations that occasionally turned into ugly clashes between pro- and anti-racist factions.
Along downtown Roanoke streets, KKK members were soliciting pedestrians for funds, outraging many members of the community. The potential for violence stemming from a march worried city leaders. Dibling sought information from the Justice Department that the city could use as grounds to deny the Klan's parade permit.
Within three weeks, the issue was moot because the Klan canceled the march. Dibling later forgot all about the FOI request.
Six years later, in 1987, he received a call from Justice asking if he was still interested in the documents. For kicks, he told them yes. Would they be available by 1990? a secretary facetiously penned on the message slip. Another six years passed, and Dibling forgot about it again.
Then Justice sent Dibling a form letter in September telling him the documents were on the way. With a cover letter thanking him for his patience, the file arrived at the end of May.
Ultimately, he ended up with an inch-thick sheaf of outdated papers short on substance, long on blackouts and withheld pages.
Part of the response is a file of photographs of Klan rallies clipped from newspapers around the nation. One of the documents reads like a doctoral thesis and is heavily footnoted. All the papers are dated before his request and are useless now.
Other documents are still under review, Justice told Dibling. With a little luck, the 50-year-old lawyer may get them before he retires.
By contrast, the city usually responds to FOI requests within five days, Dibling noted.
"If we conducted our business like [the federal government] we'd be run out of town, and justifiably so," he said.
FOI experts say delays in fulfilling requests are the norm for the federal government. The 28-year-old Freedom of Information Act generates up to 2,000 requests each day. In 1991 alone, the government spent $91 million processing 589,391 FOI requests, said Harry Hammitt, an FOI watchdog who publishes the Lynchburg-based Access Reports newsletter. The vast majority of FOI requests are filed by businesses, average citizens and state and local governments seeking access to federal government files, he said.
Frequently FOI filers never get the documents they wanted, said Rebecca Daugherty, director of the FOI Service Center for the Reporters' Committee for Freedom of the Press in Washington. Dibling's wait may be a record.
"I've never heard of anyone getting a response after 13 years," Daugherty said. "Good for him for sticking to his guns. The government ought not to be able to bore you to death as an excuse not to fulfill a request."
President Clinton last year promised to streamline the FOI process, and the fact that Dibling got a response at all may be evidence of that, she said.
John Russell, a Justice Department spokesman, laid blame for the delay on a "crunch" of FOI requests that bogged down the agency in the early 1980s.
"There was this big backlog and this was one of the stragglers of that batch," he said.
Some of the records came from the FBI, and the agency meticulously culled through them to ensure that confidential informants weren't identified, he added.
Russell noted that his own boss, former NBC correspondent Carl Stern, has encountered his own delays with the Freedom of Information Act.
Stern once asked the government whether Billy Carter, then-President Jimmy Carter's brother, had paid import duties on a silver saddle he'd bought on a junket to Libya. Stern got an answer 11 years later, Russell said.
"I think [Dibling's] hit the record," he said.
by CNB