The Brew received this response from Mayor Brandon Scott’s office to our questions regarding a hearing on Bill 26-0164 to return records access to the Office of the Inspector General.

We had asked about statements made by attorneys from the city law department at the hearing.

Saying The Brew story had not provided proper context for their response, a spokesperson asked that we publish it in full.

“As you often do, you selectively edited our response to change the meaning to serve your article’s framing,” the spokesperson wrote. “This selective editing is clearly a deliberate effort to remove the context provided in the full response because it didn’t fit the narrative you were looking to craft.”

FULL TEXT:

The Law Department representatives were specifically addressing the photograph of blacked out documents that the OIG had circulated in the media and was referenced during the hearing, not all of the redactions.

As you know, there are redactions on roughly 200 pages out of more than 2,000 pages of documents produced for the OIG, and some of these were redacted by the Law Department in accordance with the MPIA.

The portion of the documents the Law Department representatives were addressing during the hearing included seventeen pages of supporting documentation submitted by a vendor to MONSE for reimbursement, which contained redactions of their internal bank statements. The redactions, as submitted to MONSE, covered unrelated charges for which they were not seeking reimbursement from the City as part of their invoice.

The vendor did not redact charges related to their invoice or the reimbursement they sought. Therefore, the unrelated charges would not have been relevant to MONSE’s reimbursement process.

This delineation between relevant and irrelevant banking or personal financial information is standard practice when submitting supporting documentation for reimbursement.