A case heard by the Georgia Supreme Court earlier this month involving a payday lending group and a Kennesaw State associate dean could have an impact on Georgia’s open records laws.
The dispute started after the Consumer Credit Research Foundation asked KSU to organize a study to find out if payday lending helps or hurts borrowers. The university commissioned Graduate College associate dean and professor of statistics Jennifer Priestley to conduct the study.
The CCRF had given the university a dataset of information on 37 million payday lending borrowers spread across four years, Priestley said. She explained that it is not out of the ordinary for organizations to come to the university with these requests.
A watchdog group named the Campaign for Accountability later sent an open records request to KSU to obtain communications between Priestley and the CCRF because they believed that the payday lending group had influenced the results of the study.
Executive director of the CfA Daniel Stevens said that they had several reasons to believe that the CCRF may have influenced the results of the study. He said that the CCRF had previously used money to influence the results of a similar study that they asked a professor at Arkansas Tech University to conduct in 2015. He also said that Priestley had thanked the CCRF for their work within the study.
The CCRF provided KSU with a grant of $30,000, but Priestley said she never received any money for her work on the study. She said that $30,000 is “small by grant standards” and that 100 percent of the funds from the grant went to graduate students.
The Board of Regents said that the communications between the CCRF and Priestley should be released, but the CCRF filed a suit against the university to prevent the release of the communications, according to the AJC.
Stevens said that the CfA had originally won the case in a lower court, but the CCRF took the case to the Georgia Court of Appeals last year where the court ruled in favor of the payday lending group. The court’s decision, based on a past Georgia Supreme Court case , said that the Open Records Act contains certain exceptions for the nondisclosure of information.
An attorney representing the Board of Regents warned the justices that the decision could have an immense impact how citizens can obtain records in Georgia, according to the AJC. In the Open Records Act, there are some exceptions that prohibit the release of information, and others leave the decision up to the agency as to what information should be released.
The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, The AJC, the Georgia First Amendment Foundation and the Georgia Press Association filed a joint legal brief asking the high court to require the release of the information.
Stevens also said that the decision could impact citizens, explaining that industries would be able to disclose what they want and that there would be a decline in transparency by organizations and industries.
“From the beginning, I’ve said, ‘take the emails,’ because there is nothing there,” Priestley said.
Priestley said that she had offered to make her code for the study available to anyone who asked her for it, but explained that the CfA was not interested. She said the watchdog group only wanted the communications between her and the CCRF.
She said that the only reason the CCRF does not want to release the communications to the CfA is that they are worried the watchdog group will present their communication out of context to make it seem like the group was trying to influence study results.
She believes the dispute between the CfA and the CCRF is due to the highly politicized nature of the study’s topic.
“Payday lending is a social hot button right now,” she said.
Priestley also said that the CfA was simply trying to take attention away from the results of the study, which showed that, in some cases, payday loans can have a beneficial financial impact on borrowers.
Because the court’s decision was made based off of a past Georgia Supreme Court case, the CfA was able to ask the court to review the case. The Supreme Court hearing for the case was on Feb. 5, and the court should make its final decision within the next month, Stevens said.
