On Friday, King County Superior Court Judge Jean A. Rietschel ruled that the Woodland Park Zoo is not obligated to respond to public-disclosure requests—even though it receives roughly $10 million a year in taxpayer money.

City and county taxpayers forked out $10.5 million to the zoo in 2012 and have paid between 30 and 42 percent of its budget over the past 10 years. The zoo also uses city parkland and buildings rent free. And if the surprisingly controversial Proposition 1 (which would change the way we fund parks from a levy system to an ongoing tax system) passes, the zoo could get another $2 million of public money per year. But according to the judge, the zoo doesn't owe the public the same kind of transparency as a government agency.

This case stems from a long-running dispute between activists with Friends of Woodland Park Zoo Elephants and the zoo itself. Friends has criticized the zoo of keeping its elephants in cramped and unhealthy conditions and serially inseminating one of them to try and produce a crowd-drawing baby, which resulted in many miscarriages and one baby that soon died of elephant herpes. (For more details, see "Cash Cow" by Cienna Madrid back in 2011.)

Friends of Woodland Park Zoo Elephants filed a public-disclosure request asking for information about how much the elephant program costs, how elephants are treated, how much time elephant keepers spend staffing "the barn," the zoo's Elephant Task Force, how it spent $480,000 responding to Friends' protests, and a few other issues.

The zoo refused, the activists sued, and on Friday Judge Rietschel agreed with the Woodland Park Zoological Society.

The heart of Judge Rietschel's decision, she explained, was the Telford Test (that link is a pdf), a four-part standard established in 2010 to determine whether a given organization is a government agency: Whether it performs a government function, how much public funding it receives, how closely it's managed and regulated by the government, and whether it was created by the government.

"There is significant amount of governmental funding for the zoo," Judge Rietschel agreed, but in every other respect (function, day-to-day operations, and its genesis) it's really a nonprofit and therefore exempt from public-disclosure rules.

“While this Court is in total sympathy with the idea that citizens should be able to follow the money and find out what has been done," she said, "under the cases that are before me and that I have to follow I can’t find that one factor [the public funding question] overwhelms the three factors that don’t fall in its favor. So I must grant summary judgment in favor of the defendants under the test as been upheld by the Court of Appeals."

Does this ruling—that a private nonprofit, heavily subsidized by the government, doesn't have to disclose anything to the public—have broader implications for public-disclosure requests in general?

Probably not, says Toby Nixon of the Washington Coalition for Open Government. "A lot of governments contract out a lot of services to nonprofits," he said. "Not just running zoos, but all kinds of human services." He reviewed briefs on both sides of the case. "After reading them," he said, "I really thought that the zoo had the stronger argument—it's not that 100 percent of what they do is controlled by the government, or the government chooses their board, or that it was created by government."

Whether or not the zoo is mistreating its elephants, this case probably won't have much impact the way we deal with public disclosure and government agencies.

This is a longer excerpt from the judge's remarks:

“This Court does not find that it’s clear that the Woodland Park Zoological Society is not an agency. The court believes the issue is whether it’s a functional equivalent of a public agency. Looking at that I’m obliged to look at the four-part test that has been set forth by the Court of Appeals.

1. “The first issue is, ‘Does the entity perform a governmental function?’ A zoo is clearly a function that could be public or private. I don’t think that matters set forth by the plaintiff are sufficient to have this court find that factor in favor of finding that it’s a government function. The other cases that found a government function find it in matters such as a actually enforcing the laws and issuing citations, animal control and that type of thing. Providing services are not generally thought of as the government function. So I cannot find that factor in favor of the plaintiffs. I find that factor in favor of the zoo.

2. “The second issue is the level of government funding. By the parties’ briefing it appears that 26-30% of the funding for the zoo comes from the city. That they will be part of a pending proposition if that passes. It is also true that the city owns the land and provides it, as well as the buildings and the animals. The court recognizes the Spokane case that the value of the land for the City of Seattle is quite different. There’s a magnitude property here that’s large. It would be worth a considerable amount of money. There’s not a proportion that’s set before the Court but looking at the value of that type of land in the city, plus building and animals the Court does find that there is significant amount of governmental funding for the zoo. So I find that factor in favor of the plaintiffs.

3. “The extent of government involvement toward regulation. If you look at the agreement the part that the government is involved in is issues of naming, fees, reversionary interests in the animals, annual reports, audits, some appointments to the board and that there was legislation necessary to create the zoo being a managed by the nonprofit agency. And in the Sebek case (Sebek vs. City of Seattle, 2012) the Court upheld that the zoo was not an arm of the government. The Court of Appeals said that it controlled its own day-to-day operations and reports directly to its own board. Considering that case and the day-to-day control by the nonprofit, the Court has to find that factor in favor of the defendants.

4. “The last factor is whether the entity was created by the government. The case law is clear that I have to look at the entity in question as being subject to the Public Records Act and that entity is the nonprofit here. That entity was not created by the government. It has operated since 2002 when the zoo was transferred to them, and though I recognize that the zoo was a city park previously owned and operated by the city for a long time, the way that test is looked at by all the Courts of Appeals and cases previously, it is the nonprofit agency that’s looked at. So that factor is in favor of the defendant.

“In looking at this unbalance, it is really a level of government funding that is most strongly in favor of the plaintiff and looking at the other factors are in favor of finding that the zoo is not subject to the Public Records Act.

“While this Court is in total sympathy with the idea that citizens should be able to follow the money and find out what has been done, under the cases that are before me and that I have to follow I can’t find that one factor overwhelms the three factors that don’t fall in its favor. So I must grant summary judgment in favor of the defendants under the test as been upheld by the Court of Appeals. So I would grant defense motion for summary judgment and deny plaintiffs motion for summary judgment.”