Minnesota Governor Tim Walz issued his first significant COVID-19 shutdown order on March 16. The order was subsequently continued and extended on March 25 with the ensuing loss of some 795,000 jobs. I wondered if Walz took any account of the economic devastation he was causing before he promulgated his shutdown orders.
On April 23 I submitted a Minnesota Data Practices Act request to Governor Walz seeking “all economic data and economic analysis submitted to you in connection with each of the executive orders you have promulgated in connection with COVID-19, specifically including analysis of anticipated job losses.”
Working with Kevin Roche on a long-form article to a May 31 deadline for the Center of the American Experiment’s Thinking Minnesota magazine, I all but begged Walz Deputy General Counsel and Data Practices Compliance Official Emily Parks to respond to my request by May 15. She said they were busy but would try to accommodate me. Late yesterday afternoon Ms. Parks sent me the response to my request, more than a month after the deadline I had set so that Kevin and I might incorporate the response in our article.
Walz’s response is stunning. Consisting of three documents produced by email as PDF attachments, it’s too small to call it a Friday afternoon document dump. It’s a Friday afternoon document trickle. The documents are dated respectively April 3 (six pages), April 17 (six pages), and May 27 (a two-page memo “To whom it may concern” summarizing the April 3 and April 17 memos). That’s it.
You may wonder why the first two documents couldn’t have been produced on the timeline I requested. By themselves they were entirely responsive to my request. You may wonder if Governor Walz might have been slow walking the production to miss our deadline. So do we.
Note that we were only asking for documents that already existed, not for the completion of a study in response to the request. Walz has expressed sympathy to those who have been hurt by the shutdown, but we wondered how he weighed the costs and benefits of his shutdown orders. We didn’t think he had much in the way of economic analysis before him on March 16 or March 25. Until yesterday we didn’t know how right we were.
Ms. Parks’s email message to me yesterday afternoon states: “Our office has elected not to charge for costs related to this request, but we reserve the right to charge for future requests.” How much does it cost to convert three short documents to PDF and email them to your humble correspondent? Surely she jests.
Below is the the first of the three documents produced by Governor Walz in response to my request. It’s not bad, and I am posting it here for all to see, but it seems a little late to us. We can say, on the other hand, that its lateness doesn’t matter. Governor Walz would have done what he has done in any event.
UPDATE: Kevin Roche comments more pointedly in “Dictator Walz Gave No Consideration to Any Harms Before Issuing Extreme Lockdown Orders.”
Responsive Data 1 by Scott Johnson on Scribd
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