UW-Milwaukee settled an open records lawsuit and agreed to pay nearly $12,000 in attorney fees to their campus newspaper Friday.
The lawsuit, filed in November 2009 by The UWM Post, requested that the university turn over unredacted documents from a UW-Milwaukee student government body that handles union policy.
According to Kevin Lessmiller, editor-in-chief of The UWM Post, the UW-Milwaukee records custodian cited the federal Family Education and Rights Privacy Act as reason to withhold records of minutes from a Union Policy Board meeting that occurred last January.
He said UW-Milwaukee ""stretched their definition of FERPA"" and said student government bodies should be held openly.
Tyler Kristopeit, Union Policy Board chair, said the university offered to turn over unredacted documents if all board members agreed to openly submit their information. However, when one student decided against submitting his information, both personal and policy information was blocked out.
""Normally if it was a redaction, it would just be a name… but in this case, it would be whole sections,"" he said. ""There would be 10-minute spaces where there wasn't any sound, and all of a sudden you would hear the Assistant Union Director say, ‘Yeah, that is correct.'""
Kristopeit said he did not understand why the university was adamant about withholding the information and said the unredacted documents did not include content that posed a threat to UW-Milwaukee. He said he tried to get unredacted documents for The UWM Post but was unable to provide them.
""I tried to help them get the documents and I couldn't even do it,"" he said.
