Longtime WBIR-TV journalist John Becker of Knoxville has filed a court petition appealing a denial of public records held by the University of Tennessee from UT-Battelle LLC, which runs the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and which UT jointly owns.
Longtime WBIR journalist John Becker has filed a lawsuit challenging the University of Tennessee’s denial of public records related to its joint venture, UT-Battelle, which runs the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
A show cause hearing for the case is set before Knox County Chancellor John Weaver on Friday, May 31.
UT-Battelle LLC was formed in 1999 and is owned by the University of Tennessee and Battelle Memorial Institute.
Becker asked for agreements related to UT’s formation and operation of UT-Battelle as well as records received from UT-Battelle over eight months in 2022 by seven university administrators, including UT’s president, its chief financial officer, its vice president for research and its former liaison with UT-Battelle.
UT cites why it won’t release UT-Battelle records
Several months after Becker’s public records request, the university made some records available but withheld many others, including the operating agreements. UT attorney Thomas Harold Pinkley said that the operating agreements were exempt from the Tennessee Public Records Act under trade secret law and the Federal Procurement Integrity statute.
The university also cited a subsection of a state law about certain records of the state veterinarian in the agriculture department that said, “Information received by the state that is required by federal law or regulation to be kept confidential shall be exempt from public disclosure,” claiming this exemption applied to any records received by any state agency, not just the state veterinarian.
The university also said the requested records of the seven administrators were not public records because they were received in their capacity as board members for UT-Battelle, not in their capacity of employment with UT. Finally, the university said some records were exempt under the attorney-client privilege, the joint interest privilege and the deliberative process privilege.
A year after request, UT releases redacted operating agreements
Almost a year after Becker’s request and after a letter from Becker’s attorney, the university finally provided redacted versions of the current operating agreement and of the original 1999 operating agreement. The university claimed the redactions were allowed to protect trade secrets. Some of the redactions were under subheadings about UT-Battelle’s board, how net profits and losses were to be allocated and how authority was delegated between the executive group, committees and subcommittees.
However, the university declined to respond to Becker’s request for other documents received by the seven university administrators, and added a new reason for the refusal: Pinkley claimed Becker’s request was “overly broad” and “not a proper request under the Public Records Act.”
Reporters Committee lawyer challenges withholding of remaining records
Paul McAdoo, an attorney with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, represents Becker as part of the Reporters Committee’s Local Legal Initiative which provides legal services to journalists in six states to help them pursue enterprise and investigative stories.
In questioning the redactions, McAdoo in the petition noted that UT-Battelle has previously made public the identity of its board of governors. He also said the operating agreements were public records because they were made or received by UT and its administrators in connection with the transaction of government business.
McAdoo asserted that none of the records withheld were trade secrets exempt from the Tennessee Public Records law. He also said the attorney-client privilege and joint interest privilege does not apply because the university has not met its burden to show that it applies. The deliberative process privilege, McAdoo said, has not been established by statute, binding case law, or other state law and is not an exception to the Tennessee Public Records Act. Even if the deliberative process did apply, McAdoo said, it would apply only to pre-decisional documents and would not apply to Becker’s records requests because the public interest in the records outweigh any interest in secrecy.
McAdoo also pushed back on the federal statutes that UT said exempt records under the Tennessee Public Records Act. The Tennessee Public Records Law says that records are public unless exempted by state law. The statute in state law allowing information received by the state that is confidential under federal law applies only to records in that subsection about the state veterinarian, he said. And the Federal Procurement Integrity Act is inapplicable as a state law exemption to the public records law.
Becker has been a reporter and anchor at WBIR-TV in Knoxville for 18 years. Prior to that, he worked as a journalist at television stations from 1995 to 2006 in Missouri, Kansas and Oregon. In addition to his anchor duties, he produces and moderates a well-known weekly program, Inside Tennessee.
University of Tennessee is the state’s flagship public university. Battelle Memorial Institute is a science and development company organized as a nonprofit that traces its origin to the fortune of Ohio industrialist Gordon Battelle.
