After a district judge ruled last week in the ISU Foundation case, a new round of negotiations is planned between open records advocates and the organization.

The ruling required the Iowa Board of Regents to comply with a February Iowa Supreme Court ruling and specified the board is the lawful custodian of the ISU Foundation’s records. Details of future treatment of open records requests and specifically the status of the requests made by Des Moines businessman Arlen Nichols and former ISU employee Mark Gannon remain to be decided.

“We’re now supposed to sit down and work out procedural details about how you go about getting records from the Foundation,” said Thomas Hanson, Gannon and Nichols’s attorney.

The ruling required the foundation and Regents to “take all appropriate steps” to make records available to open records advocates for inspection, instead of requiring the request of specific records.

“In order for us to be fairly granted access, we have to know what’s there and what form it’s in,” Hanson said.

The ruling specified the foundation must comply with Iowa law on the details, such as hours when records are available, copying costs and the supervision of inspections.

The ruling also specified the custodians are Johnny Pickett, associate vice president for business and finance and controller, and Barb Boose, communications director for the Board of Regents.

Warren Madden, vice president for business and finance and Pickett’s supervisor, said university and regent employees were chosen instead of ISU Foundation officials because the foundation performs a university function dealing with university records, despite being a nongovernment organization.

“We’ve delegated a function to the Foundation, but it’s still a university function, therefore the requests for information should come to the governmental entity,” he said.

Hanson said that although the Board of Regents was ordered to pay only $25,000 in attorney fees, as opposed to the $58,000 requested, future payments could be made after more negotiations over the disclosure of records take place.

According to the ruling, “In the event that the parties and their attorneys cannot come to a mutually agreeable manner in which to do this, any party may bring this matter back before the court for further proceedings with the understanding that the petitioners may be entitled to additional attorney fees” if the Foundation’s position is “unreasonable, untenable or inconsistent with Iowa law.”

Hanson said no date has been set for negotiations.

“It was pretty clear we could go right back to court, the burden’s on them to show it’s not subject to open records law,” Gannon said.

He said future legal action is not planned and depends on whether requests he and Nichols made four years ago are honored.

“It depends on if the attitudes of the parties has changed in any material way,” Hanson said on the likelihood of successful negotiations.