All 45 outstanding tickets were voided 
 

The information, not revealed at first by police, was obtained during a telephone conversation with Sheila Holloway of the Cookeville Police Department, recorded with her knowledge and agreement. 
After numerous phone calls and trips to Cookeville's offices for the correct records -- persistence City Manager Jim Shipley calls "harassment" and "intimidation" of public employees because city employees don't like to have to answer requests for records right away --  The Pit learned that 41 pages of documents handed over to The Pit by police were trash. Meanwhile, the city refuses to give The Putnam Pit computer data in its electronic form. Thus, under City Manager Jim Shipley and City Attorney T. Michael O'Mara, the city can smply hand out garbage in response to open records requests, and only have to give the real material if they get caught.

The first set of "public records" obtained by The Pit made it seem that Coomer had only been cited twice. Pursuing factual records after learning the ones offered were no good, The Pit learned that Tennessee license plate HDZ200, registered to Lewis Coomer, had been cited not twice but 45 times between Jan. 17, 1992 and Dec. 6, 1993.

"He's never paid," Holloway said. "One of them is outstanding."

By far, public officials and lawyers are the most common violators and least likely to pay, the record shows, although we can't be sure the city is not giving us false information and we will therefore not quote from it.

However, among those we have double checked:

• Jerry Lee Burgess reportedly had about 50 outstanding tickets, but our follow up, conducted when Chief Bill Benson questioned the data, revealed that Burgess owed on only one. Can he sue the city for providing false information and reckless disregard for the truth?
• City Attorney T. Michael O'Mara, the city prosecutor who made about $10,000 for the work his former law partner did prosecuting a speeding ticket in 1995,  received eight tickets in 1992 according to the records O'Mara insists The Pit be satisfied with. The records he would have us shut up and be thankful to have indicate he still owes for two. But when we had Holloway check the data base, through persistent intimidation and harassment, in Shipley's words, it turns out that he suddenly had nine tickets, not eight. O'Mara has consistently resisted attempts to get records on him, especially the back-up documents for his expenses charged to the city, which we sought seven months ago.

• General Sessions Judge Nolan Goolsby had nine parking violations between May 7, 1994 and March 14, 1995. According to the Holloway, the Police Department office manager, Goolsby paid seven of them on June 23, 1995. Two remain unpaid or were changed, like Coomer's.

To compound the problem, the police department has not sent out warning letters to scofflaws for more than a year, and Chief Bill Benson said he had no policy about collecting the money. He said he has paid a contested ticket for a disgruntled citizen himself, and at one point when a transition was underway to introduce parking meters there was some confusion and many tickets were changed to warnings. He said he had no policy about allowing tickets to be changed to warnings.

Well, that's good news for Lewis Coomer. But for those who pay their tickets and have no connections, they're feeling a little chiseled right now.

Lt. Nathan Honeycutt, who oversees the department's computer system, said the Coomer situation "doesn't sound like an everyday occurrence."

But Honeycutt blamed an old computer system, pieced together through the years with program-as-you-go makeshift problem solving, and bad data entry by former employees.

To complicate matters, citations are logged by license numbers and not all are matched to names, police officials said.

O'Mara and City Manager Jim Shipley's on-going attempts to keep information from The Pit have resulted in the filing of a federal civil rights suit against the city, O'Mara and Shipley. In this case, their efforts cost the city money it would have taken in from fines.

But it's no surprise that the city would rather pay 10 times more in legal fees than it would cost to provide the records. In fact, even the civil rights suit hasn't tempered their authority fixation. Since the federal suit was filed, the city has:

• Refused to turn over documents requested in a seven-month-old public records request for O'Mara's backup records on the basis of which he charges expenses to the city;

• Refused to produce evidence that its contract with a Columbia, Tenn., firm that process the city's data prohibits the sharing of the electronic data with the public; that is, the city maintains that the public cannot have the public record in the form it is maintained because the city has contracted with a firm that won't let the public have it;

• Withheld 15 of 18 test results taken by police applicants, alleging the answer sheets had been shredded when they had not. The answer sheets were finally turned over;
• Provided only one annual job-performance evaluation sheet each for Shipley and his predecessor, the fired John Gentry, although other employees say they have been evaluated every year;

Cookeville's reluctance to make its records available on tape or diskette forces employees to use their time doing what reporters could do at no cost to taxpayers, and would free the city from the perception that it lacks the commitment, competence or will to operate in the open.

O'Mara, who drags the city into these situations then makes $125 an hour dealing with the problems he causes, denied he was motivated by personal animosity, but other Cookeville residents have heard him express the contrary.

"We're not being arbitrary," O'Mara told another local lawyer who swore out an affidavit.  "We just don't want Geoff Davidian to have the records."

And if we don't get them, you don't get them.