By: David MorrisonPublished: September 08, 2011Between July 6, 2010 and the start of last football season, the Auburn athletic department received only three public records requests pertaining to the football program from media entities. From Nov. 4 to Dec. 9, it received 11 requests for information on one subject alone. The subject nobody’s been able to escape for the past 10 months. “The Cam Newton topic,” Senior Executive AD for External Affairs Scott Carr, Auburn’s “point person” for records requests, said. “There was a lot more for that one topic than what we’d seen (for any single topic) in the previous year.” Auburn received 55 public records requests pertaining to the football program in the past year, including 16 having to do – in some way, shape or form – with the Tigers’ recruitment of Newton and the NCAA investigation into said recruitment, according to a log of public records requests furnished by the university and obtained by the Opelika-Auburn News under the Alabama Open Records Act. In the week after the Nov. 5 ESPN.com story that whipped up the Newton pay-for-play scandal, the Anniston Star, ESPN, USA Today, the New York Times and the Associated Press all requested any form of correspondence between the university and the NCAA, the SEC and other outside parties on possible recruiting violations committed by Auburn. ESPN requested cell and land line records for head coach Gene Chizik, wide receivers coach Trooper Taylor, running backs coach Curtis Luper, defensive line coach Tracy Rocker and Director of Player Development Ben Thomas. The New York Times requested cell phone records for Taylor, Luper, offensive coordinator Gus Malzahn and Rocker, office phone and e-mail records for Chizik, Taylor, Luper, Malzahn and Rocker, and any correspondence between the NCAA and the SEC involving John Bond or Kenny Rogers. Carr, who was hired at Auburn in the summer of 2009, said the number of total records requests the athletic department received in the past year – which he estimated to be around 100 – didn’t differ too much from the volume it handled the year before. But the number and comprehensiveness of the Newton requests was a bit unprecedented. “Some of them can take quite some time, just because there’s a lot of different issues that come into play, a lot of different departments that may come into play when you’re fulfilling requests,” Carr said. “Some requests it may take three or four different departments all getting you information, just so you can compile it and comply with the requests."There’s a lot of different steps sometimes that have to be taken that can require quite some time before you’re actually able to fulfill a request.” Carr said the university has been able to fulfill “about half” of the records requests it fielded in the past year. None of the Newton requests have been filled, he said, because the quarterback’s recruitment is part of an ongoing NCAA investigation. “The way you end up handling those – based on the statutes of the state of Alabama – is the universities are not required to turn over documents during a pending investigation,” Carr said. “The way you’ll typically handle those types of requests is to wait until the investigation is complete before you would turn over documents.” Once the Newton investigation concludes, Carr said, the athletic department still has to make sure it is complying with Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) regulations before it can release the materials. “There have been people that have followed up on numerous occasions, just to continue to check back to see if and when we were going to be releasing some documents,” Carr said. “But everybody’s been real professional about it.” The Alabama Open Records Act states, in part, that “every citizen has a right to inspect and take a copy of any public writing of this state, except as otherwise expressly provided by statute.” Auburn, being a public university, is required to comply with the act. According to the records released by Auburn, The Birmingham News made 11 records requests pertaining to the football team or Newton since July 2010, the Opelika-Auburn News made eight -- including the request for open records requests -- and ESPN and the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer each made five. Information on coaches’ contracts was the second-most requested material, with eight requests logged, and five requests each were logged for Auburn’s expense report from its trip to the BCS National Championship game and for information on which scouting services Auburn used and how much they paid for them.
http://www2.oanow.com/sports/2011/sep/08/12/newton-news-causes-increase-public-record-requests-ar-2380154/
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