The legislature finds the public records act was enacted as part of a voter initiative and is the cornerstone of transparency and accountability in state and local government. The legislature reaffirms that broad public access to government records strengthens accountability, promotes civic engagement, and fosters confidence in public institutions. The legislature further finds that misuse of the public records act for frivolous, retaliatory, or harassing purposes strains limited public resources, delays access to records for individuals who use the public records request process for legitimate purposes, and does not advance the public interest in governmental transparency. The legislature therefore finds that it is necessary to establish a legislative task force on public records act modernization to examine ways to improve the functionality of the public records act that will increase efficiency, reduce the financial burden on state and local agencies, maintain transparency in government, and deter abuse of the public records request process.

“What I hear from school districts. I hear about the resources that are diverted from educational purposes and the staff demands. demands and requests that I think the nearly all or all of the public would say are frivolous, so if you have requests that appear to be motivated by a motive that is not consistent with the concept of a law that creates transparency in government for the public, so if it's a request that is retaliation for something that is broad and intended to take up time, that is a disservice to… the requesters that have a right under the Public Records Act to receive information about government operations.”

We have a requestor who started as a disgruntled employee of a small district, who has now sent dozens of requests, many of which have involved the production of thousands of pages with redactions. We have continuously been working on multiple productions at a time for him over the past 4 ½ years. At this point, it’s just a fishing expedition about this district, but I see no end in sight. Last I heard, he was at 200+ requests to his former employer district and had essentially driven oƯ multiple public records oƯicers (PRO) at this small district because these requests were overwhelming to a PRO wearing many hats, as most PROs typically do.

A father was denied the opportunity to volunteer at the school due to his criminal background. His daughter was starting kindergarten. Nine years later, he continues to write harassing emails to the district. However, his emails sometimes contain public records requests. The district must review every email to be sure we don’t miss a valid public records request. The PRO has grounds for a restraining order,but it would merely transfer the harassment to a coworker. The district already has a 5-year restraining order against this individual for two other employees in the district. There is no end in sight. Most of his public records requests are for his own emails previously sent to the district.

The District has experienced an unprecedented number of public records requestors seeking overbroad and labor-intensive requests with no apparent legitimate purpose – most of which arrive through anonymized servers. These extensive high-volume requests resulted in an unprecedented backlog of public records requests and, although prioritization of requests is a helpful tool, the District cannot indefinitely set aside these requests to attend to time-sensitive or smaller requests. The District expends significant public resources to respond to public records requests and cannot reallocate additional public funds for this purpose without excessively interfering with its essential functions of teaching and learning.

“None of the intent was to limit the type of record that's available, but what are the motives? What are the motives for a frivolous requester? Like, are there is there financial incentive that can go away? Is there other safeguards that you know, that need to be modified, that I need to know what the incentive is for the harassing request in order to understand how to eliminate that incentive, but I like to do that without limiting the type of records available for the person.”

“The whole point of a work group is to like hear all perspectives in trying to make like a really thoughtful like approach a policy area thoughtfully, like the fact that we would go the work group route instead of just trying to make changes as we saw fit, like shows that we want to do it right, because it's important anyway.”

“I was hoping that the work group could provide like well thought out ideas for improvement that… protect the intent of the public records act, while creating efficiency, because efficiencies, efficiency is part of the goal too.”

I think the approach of Rep. Rude's bill goes wrong in two ways. The first is the focus on the intent of the requestors, and the perceived "abuse." I think it's hard to bring the community of open government advocates along when that's your starting point.

The second is that this bill is a rather typical example of legislation that doesn't bring a proposed solution forward, but rather tosses out another half million dollars of state money we don't have to fund a task force or workgroup to talk about a problem. …It's one of many bad spending habits we need to break.