APS just signed an $11,334,977.84 contract for techbooks (electronic textbooks) with a company called Discovery Education. The contract includes "professional development services" in the amount of $1,117,500.00."
The contract, link, contains a paragraph I found interesting, emphasis added;
10. Discovery understands that government entities, such as Subscriber, may be required to disclose information pursuant to applicable open records acts. In all other respects, all provisions of this Agreement (“Confidential Information”) shall be kept strictly confidential by Subscriber and may not be disclosed without prior written consent, except for any disclosure required by any order of a court or governmental authority with jurisdiction over Subscriber.In other words; even records which APS knows to be public records and ultimately subject to surrender under the Inspection of Public Records Act, cannot be surrendered unless a citizen successfully sues them in a State District Court.
Why must any of the terms of an $11.3M contract be keep secret from the folks who ponied up the $11.3M in the first place?
What is it they need to hide?
5 comments:
What is it they need to hide? Who had their palm greased.
Usually these things are requested by the producer, not the subscriber. they probably put in some discounts and offered aPS things they didn't offer other subscribers, and they don''t want to piss off other clients.
Still seems real cheesy and underhand though.
That might be OK with their private sector clients, but not with governmental agencies who are subject to public records requests.
The idea that APS is going to make people sue for records they know they have to surrender ultimately anyway, is utterly unacceptable.
Private sector doesn't care... their ass not on the line for anything.
APS makes suing them for info an artform.
Still, cheesy deals in the dark should be enough to strike the contract, or require that info-hiding be striken from contract language.
Hey, anyone see the board meeting showdown between Esquivel and Bernstein? They finally put it online. Interestingly, when Esquivel is giving his presentation on the tail wagging the dog, you hear him loud and clear. In the back and forth, you hear Bernstein responding to something so garbled you can't make it out.
And it only took them a month to put it up.
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