The investigative spotlight on the City of Aiken shines dimly at the Aiken Standard. In 2024, the paper filed a single Freedom of Information Act request to the City. The total cost was $132.

by Don Moniak

March 17, 2025

This week marks an annual media celebration known as Sunshine Week, described at sunshineweek.org as a collaboration that “shines a light on the importance of public records and open government.” All across the country, newspapers run op-eds touting their investigative performances at exposing malfeasance, corruption, and irregularities in government and business.

Central to these investigative efforts involving government is the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which also serves as a motivation for the government to create a larger domain of publicly accessible information.

For example, Section 30-4-30(D) of South Carolina’s FOIA requires several categories of information, such as public meeting minutes, to be made publicly available without a FOIA request. Compliance with that legal provision can be achieved if the “public body places the records in a form that is both convenient and practical for use on a publicly available Internet website.” Thus, local governments routinely archive meeting minutes and agendas, which are readily accessible online.

When it comes to espousing its dedication to sunshine, the Aiken Standard is no exception, previewing its participation with a quarter-page ad in its own newspaper. The ad features a photo of the Hotel Aiken, boasts of the paper’s efforts to expose the costs of Project Pascalis, and implores people to contribute to its investigative fund. (Figure 1).

The ads were supplemented with an op-ed by Executive Editor John Boyette touting the Aiken Standard’s and North Augusta Post and Courier’s past investigations, citing “stories ranging from Aiken’s downtown redevelopment efforts to the issues surrounding Wagener’s fire department. We’ve also investigated illegal bus searches along Interstate 20, allegations involving North Augusta’s former football coach, and the trail of legal action involving a developer who was involved with two high-profile local projects.”

In his column, Boyette states that this year’s investigative fundraising goal is $150,000.

However, when it comes to utilizing FOIA to investigate local city government, the paper’s efforts are a mere pittance.

According to City records, the paper filed only one FOIA request (1) with the City of Aiken in calendar year 2024. The City initially estimated the cost to be $132–but later reduced that by an unidentified amount. (The FOIA request and responses were obtained through a FOIA request, and all the files can be viewed here. )

To be fair, the January 3, 2024 request was actually composed of three incongruous parts that could have been separately filed and thus tripling the number of FOIA requests made by the newspaper in 2024. The information requested included:

1. Various correspondence and records related to Project Pascalis for the months of November and December 2021; including expense reports and emails between former Economic Development Director Tim O’Briant and former Mayor Rick Osbon, Pascalis organizer and investor Ray Massey, AMDC attorney Gary Pope, and, curiously enough, Aiken Standard editor John Boyette.

The response to this request was mostly a denial of records. There were no emails found involving either Pope or Boyette, and both the Osbon and Massey emails were denied with this language:

“Emails are exempt from disclosure. S.C. Ann. Code Section 30-4-40(a)(5) and (9) provide that a public body may exempt from disclosure ‘documents of and documents incidental to proposed sales or purchases of property,’ as well as correspondence ‘relative to efforts or activities of a public body…to attract business or industry to invest in South Carolina.’”

2. A listing of all FOIA requests to the City of Aiken for calendar year 2023.

This request was completed in full.

3. “Correspondence including emails, text messages, and records of phone calls from Aiken Economic Development Director Tim O’Briant regarding Donald Moniak or Don Moniak from June 1, 2023.”

This request yielded some concrete information, but the most critical aspect of the response was a denial of email records showing that former Economic Development Director Tim O’Briant had been conducting personal business while on the City’s time clock, and had used his city email account to conduct personal legal business. :

“Emails that are exempt pursuant to S.C. Code 30-4-40(a)(7) that are correspondence or work products of legal counsel for a public body and/or any other material that would violate attorney-client relationships; (2) Emails between Mr. O’Briant and his personal legal counsel. Such communications are likely subject to attorney-client privilege in the ongoing civil lawsuit of O’Briant v. Moniak, and FOIA does not supplement or displace the applicable rules of discovery. (See Pope v. Wilson, 427 S.C. 377 (S.C. App. 2019); NLRB v. Robbins Tire & Rubber Co., 437 U.S. 214 (1978); S.C. Code 30-4-40(a)(4)).”

The paper apparently did not view this transgression as worthy of a spotlight, or even a dim light bulb, even given the fact that Mr. O’Briant “abruptly departed” his position with the city just four weeks earlier.

This is hardly the only example of the Standard not conducting due diligence in its investigative reporting on city affairs. As reported in Which Project Pascalis Records Remain Hidden From Public View, on October 17, 2022, the Aiken Standard submitted a FOIA request to the City of Aiken for information about the Pascalis project. It was the paper’s only known FOIA request from 2022 and 2023 pertaining directly to Project Pascalis.

Request item #9 was for “The conditional purchase and sale agreement between the Aiken Municipal Development Commission and RPM Development Partners.”

In its response, the City also denied that request, citing the SC FOIA exemption for “Documents of and documents incidental to proposed contractual arrangements and documents of and documents incidental to proposed sales or purchases of property.”

However, on November 10, 2022, the Aiken Chronicles published Downtown Aiken Half-Price Sale, which contained a link to the $5 million Purchase and Sale Agreement (PSA) between the AMDC and RPM; the same PSA that the Standard had requested.

The PSA was obtained after it was inadvertently placed in the City’s online document repository on October 21, 2022, about the same time as the Standard’s FOIA request. It was removed on November 11th, the day after the Aiken Chronicles story.

Even though it was a well-read article, the Aiken Standard never reported on the very document that it had requested via FOIA, even after it became publicly available by other means—and remains available.

The paper has chosen since that time to omit from its reporting the very information it had sought via a FOIA request.

Footnote

(1) No answer was made by the Aiken Standard to an email query to confirm the existence of only one FOIA request in one year.