SEATTLE — The state Supreme Court gave new force to Washington's Public Records Act, ruling on Jan. 15 that a fine of nearly $124,000 wasn't enough for King County's inexcusable delays in responding to a disclosure request made in 1997.

It's the second time the court has ordered that a bigger penalty be paid to Armen Yousoufian, who asked for documents pertaining to the then-upcoming referendum on the public financing of Qwest Field.

"This is a very strong ruling," Yousoufian said. "People won't have to go through 12 years of litigation to get a ruling that this kind of foot-dragging and misrepresentation requires fines high enough that lawyers will take their case."

In a majority opinion written by Justice Richard Sanders, the court set out a series of factors for judges to consider when deciding how much to fine agencies that break the law, including whether the agency properly trained its workers to handle disclosure requests and the need for fines to deter future misconduct.

"A flea bite does little to deter an elephant," Sanders wrote in Yousoufian v. Sims.

Joined by Justices Charles W. Johnson, Mary E. Fairhurst and James M. Johnson, Sanders sent the case back to King County Superior Court to recalculate the penalty and make it closer to $800,000, the high end of the potential range. Justice Tom Chambers issued a concurrence, and Chief Justice Gerry Alexander issued a partial dissent.

In her full dissent, Justice Susan Owens said the $124,000 fine was reasonable and that the factors set out by Sanders were confusing. She was joined by Barbara Madsen and Karen G. Seinfeld, sitting temporarily.

Yousoufian initially filed his disclosure request with county Executive Ron Sims' office in May 1997, more than two weeks before the vote on the $300 million tax package for the stadium. He sought documents pertaining to economic impact studies about the new football and soccer stadium, and while he was able to review one such study before the vote, it took nearly four years and a lawsuit to get all of the documents he sought.

And, he said, those documents finally showed what he had believed all along: that Sims had publicly misrepresented what those economic studies found. Voters narrowly passed the stadium referendum.

A King County Superior Court judge determined that Sims' office could have turned over all the documents within five business days. The county was negligent, she said, in assigning the case to a staffer who had never been trained in the Public Records Act, in misrepresenting whether it had certain documents and where those documents were kept, and in failing to explain its delays, among other things.

Carolyn Duncan, a spokeswoman for Sims, said the county had made improvements, including hiring a public-records coordinator.

"Everyone tried their best," she said. "The employees worked in good faith; it wasn't enough."

The law provides for a penalty of between $5 and $100 for each day each record is wrongly withheld. The now-retired judge, Kathleen Learned, assigned the minimum, but even at $5 a record, that fine would have come to $1.5 million, which she deemed too steep. So she bundled the records into categories and charged $5 per day per category.

Yousoufian appealed that penalty as too light, and the state Court of Appeals and Supreme Court agreed. Another King County judge bumped the fine to $15 per category per day — nearly $124,000 in all — while attributing the delay to "poor training, failed communication, and bureaucratic ineptitude rather than a desire to hide some dark secret.'"

Yousoufian appealed again, and on Jan. 15 the high court again agreed with him.

"The potential for public harm was high; the requested records tested the veracity of King County's assertions regarding a pending referendum on a $300 million public financing scheme," Sanders wrote.

Public-records activists said they hoped the ruling would frighten government agencies into complying with the law.

"The justices really made it clear that this isn't just about culpability — was there good faith or bad faith on the part of the agency — but what it will take to deter agencies from doing this," said Seattle open-records attorney Michele Earl-Hubbard.

Yousoufian, 61, is a retired businessman who lives on Vashon Island. He says he doesn't really need the money and doesn't know what he'll do with it. He said it took him two years to find a lawyer to take on his case — many told him they didn't think they'd make any money — and he had considered launching a foundation to support people who wish to file open-government lawsuits.

One of his attorneys, Michael Brannan of Edmonds, said he hoped the Legislature would establish an independent agency with prosecutorial powers to handle public-records cases. One bill introduced in Olympia this session would create such a panel.

"There ought to be a way for citizens to have access to public records without having to hire a lawyer," he said.