Shortly after Tom Trask resigned as Tarpon Springs’ city attorney last year, citing “baseless public attacks,” he hired a lawyer to request city commissioners’ emails, text messages and other public records that discussed his tenure.
On Friday, about six months after submitting the first request, his law firm sued Tarpon Springs, alleging city officials violated Florida’s public records law by causing unreasonable delays and manufacturing confusion as an excuse for their failure to turn over all records.
According to Trask’s partner, attorney Jay Daigneault, the firm sought records to piece together circumstances around “utterly false allegations” related to Trask’s handling of a controversial apartment complex proposal near the Anclote River, which former city commissioners approved in late 2021.
By withholding the records, Daigneault said his presumption is “there are records in that production that they would prefer we do not see.”
“Filing the lawsuit against the city of Tarpon Springs is about the last thing in the world we wanted to do,” Daigneault said. “They have obligations under the public records law they are not meeting and it appears they wish to avoid us. Common sense says there’s probably a reason for that.”
On Monday, Mayor Costa Vatikiotis said that the city is not delaying and that it has taken time to review tens of thousands of records before releasing those that are relevant. To help with the voluminous task, Vatikiotis said the city hired a Florida...
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