Circuit Court Judge J. Scott Duncan has denied a motion by Howard Steele seeking to intervene as a party to a lawsuit brought in May of 2024 by the city of Milton against its mayor, Heather Lindsay.
The case has now been closed.
Steele, a resident of Milton, had argued in his April 17 motion that 315 documents in Lindsay’s possession, at one time deemed by Duncan to be public records, should be made available to him for review. The judge, who on May 5 ruled on both Steele’s motion and closed the case, cited four factors that had brought him to his decision to deny.
Duncan wrote in the denial that Steele had submitted his public records request for the records in question to the city and not the mayor herself. He also said that Steele also sought the release of communications between people who were not party to the original lawsuit.
The judge said in the ruling that Steele’s request for records was “much narrower in scope” than the city’s demand for release had been and he said allowing an intervention into the case would not be appropriate because a settlement had been reached between the mayor and city a year after the litigation had started.
At the request of then-City Attorney Alex Andrade on May 15, 2024, a Milton City Council whose eight-member body then consisted of four members no longer serving in office voted to take Lindsay to court to obtain public records that had allegedly been withheld for months. Andrade contended the failure to disclose the records violated the state’s Sunshine Law.
Duncan agreed to review over 3,200 documents containing an estimated 100,000 individual call records and text messages. He determined some of what he looked at to be public records, some to be private records and some whose status he could not decide without having further information.
In January, he ruled that the records he had found to be public should be turned over to the city, but in February Lindsay filed objections to releasing 315 of those she had been ordered to provide. At the request of the judge she turned over all records whose release she had not objected to.
Steele initially stepped into the legal filings on April 17, the same day Duncan ruled to dismiss the legal dispute between the city and its mayor. The two sides made the decision to end the suit with neither seeking litigation fees from the other.
In dismissing the lawsuit the judge said Lindsay would not be required to turn over the 315 records she had fought to keep from the public.
He said that because the city did not challenge Lindsay’s legal objections to turning the records over, expressed no interest in obtaining them and requested that the lawsuit be dismissed, his order that she disclose the documents had been rendered moot.
This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: In with a bang, out with a whisper; judge quietly closes Milton vs mayor lawsuit
Reporting by Tom McLaughlin, Pensacola News Journal / Pensacola News Journal
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