Wrong time for fight

Two government agencies that share a vital mission should not be battling each other over public records or creating unnecessary expense for taxpayers. The Pinellas County and St. Petersburg housing authorities are guilty of both offenses and should shape up.

The relationship between the two agencies has been toxic since Darrell Irions, who heads the city authority, quit as the simultaneous director of the county authority in April after clashing with its board.

The county authority sent a voluminous public records request to the city housing authority in September for copies of all records pertaining to a now-abandoned plan for a joint headquarters building. The county supposedly needs the records to seek a refund from a law firm that handled the building project. If that's the only purpose, why has the county authority also demanded copies of every e-mail to or from Irions on any subject from October 2007 to May 2009?

The city authority says it will need seven months to fulfill the request. And the cost, at 15 cents a page for some 17,000 documents plus $29 an hour for a supervisor to review them, could be more than $19,000. While state law allows levying of special fees for large records requests, the $29 rate and the seven-month time frame are unreasonable. But so is the county authority's broad request for records. Rather than narrowing or phasing its request, it has asked the state attorney general to investigate.

Taxpayers should not have to pay for a fishing expedition by the county housing authority, and neither agency can afford to be distracted from providing much-needed housing in this recession. The records battle, fed by hard feelings and old suspicions, isn't nearly so important as that mission.