Companies performing municipal or government work face unique challenges when they need to share their confidential or proprietary information with public agencies. These companies must be wary of state public records laws and the Freedom of Information Act. A recent case, All Aboard Florida — Operations, LLC v. State of Florida, et al., filed in Leon County, Florida, illustrates this.
All Aboard Florida is attempting to develop passenger rail service between Miami and Orlando. It is doing so in partnership with various governmental entities. Recently, Orlando developer Matthew Falconer served various Florida agencies with requests under Florida’s Public Records Act for various documents relating to All Aboard Florida’s efforts.
According to the complaint, these agencies told All Aboard Florida that they intended to provide Falconer with All Aboard Florida’s Florida Ridership and Revenue Study. In response, All Aboard Florida filed this complaint for declaratory and injunctive relief, seeking protection under Florida’s Trade Secrets Act. According to All Aboard Florida, this study is a trade secret:
The Ridership Study analyzes expected market share for AAF’s service, including the effects of various pricing and travel time scenarios on AAF ridership. As such, the Ridership Study is an extremely sensitive and commercially valuable document, the disclosure of which to the public could place AAF at an unfair competitive disadvantage vis-à-vis airlines and other transportation alternatives.
Under Florida’s Public Records Act, trade secrets are exempt from disclosure.
When All Aboard Florida provided this study to the government, it marked each page as proprietary and confidential. For companies facing this situation who have no choice but to provide proprietary information to a government agency, I would recommend going one step further: Label each page of any proprietary document as “Trade Secret Information Protected From Disclosure By Section 815.045, Florida Statutes” (or the relevant statute in the state at issue).
The goal is to make it as simple as possible for the government employees responding to a public-records request to recognize that the document at issue should not be disclosed.