Gainesville will appeal a decision made by a Hall County judge last week.

In a split decision, the City Council voted on Tuesday to appeal an order requiring city officials to make public an anonymous letter that led to the former city manager’s resignation.

The letter, sent anonymously to two city officials late last year, accused former City Manager Bryan Shuler of sexually harassing two city employees. The letter led to an investigation and the subsequent resignation of Shuler, who is now Colquitt County’s manager.

The city has kept private the names of the two city employees named as victims in the letter and the name of a third employee, unrelated to the allegations.

Ruling on a lawsuit The Times filed against the city in March, Hall County Superior Court Judge Bonnie Chessher Oliver ordered the city to make the entire letter a public document by July 6. City officials decided Tuesday to challenge the decision in the Georgia Court of Appeals.

Council members discussed the lawsuit in an hourlong, specially called, closed-door meeting. When the meeting was later opened to the public, Councilman Danny Dunagan said: "I make a motion we appeal the decision."

Mayor Pro Tem Ruth Bruner quickly seconded the motion before Mayor Myrtle Figueras clarified that "the decision" was Oliver’s decision ordering the city to make the full document public. Taken to a vote, Councilmen George Wangemann and Robert "Bob" Hamrick opposed the motion to appeal. Hamrick did not return a call seeking comment. Wangemann said the council members had been instructed not to comment.

The attorney representing the city, Sam Harben Jr., said he hoped to file the appeal by the end of the day Tuesday.

"It’s essentially the same position that we’ve taken," Harben said. "The privacy rights of these employees outweighs the right of the press to print their names."

The Times requested the letter from the city in mid-November, the day Shuler immediately resigned from his post. The city provided the letter within the time frame required by the state’s Open Records Act with three names redacted, or removed, from it.

In defending its stance that the names legally could be removed from the letter, the city cited an exemption to the state’s Open Records Act that allows governments to withhold "medical or veterinary records and similar files, the
disclosure of which would be an invasion of personal privacy."

The Times had argued that without access to the names, it could not verify that the complaint had been properly handled by the city and that an appropriate investigation of the allegations had been made. After months of negotiations between the city and the newspaper, The Times filed suit against the city in March, claiming the city was violating the Open Records Act.

Oliver agreed with The Times. In a ruling filed Friday, the judge wrote that the removed names do not fall under any exemption of the state’s Open Records law.

"Without the names of the two women, no further investigation is possible and the purpose of the Open Records Act is frustrated," Oliver wrote. "... no privacy rights can justify the suppression of information, or in this case the identity of a source of information, which is of public concern."

After the council’s vote to appeal the decision Tuesday, Harben said the city still stands by a previous offer to show The Times an unedited version of the letter if the newspaper promises not to publish the employees’ names. The Times has repeatedly refused that offer.

"The city agreed to release the information to us if it could dictate how we would use it, which was a level of censorship we would not accept," The Times’ publisher Dennis Stockton said last week.

And now that the city has decided to appeal, Stockton said The Times will also appeal Oliver’s decision to not award the newspaper attorneys’ fees. The Times requested the fees as part of its original lawsuit against the city, claiming that city officials were not substantially justified in refusing to provide the unedited letter.

Oliver ruled, however, that the city was justified in believing parts of the document should be private, and did not order the city to pay the newspaper’s legal fees.

"Judge Oliver’s ruling showed a very clear understanding of the Open Records Act and why it is vital that the public have access to government records," Stockton said. "It’s hard for us to understand how the city can challenge her ruling, but it’s easy to appeal a case when you are paying your attorneys with taxpayer money instead of your own. We had decided not to pursue an appeal on the issue of legal fees, but now that the city has chosen not to abide by Judge Oliver’s ruling we will reinstate our request for reimbursement.

"The three city officials who voted to appeal have shown they are willing to go to great lengths to keep the public from knowing what goes on in the city. It is sad that they have so little respect for state law and the public they are sworn to serve."