Our work at the Research Council relies on access to public data (and TVW!). In my experience, some agencies are more helpful than others. For example, the Office of Financial Management, Economic and Revenue Forecast Council, and Legislative Evaluation and Accountability Program Committee have consistently provided data in a timely manner. I am extremely grateful to their staff for taking transparency seriously.

Not all requests go as smoothly. Some agencies follow a needlessly rigid protocol even for simple requests. For example, this summer I asked an agency for several reports that I knew had previously been shared with the Legislature but that weren’t posted on the agency website. Instead of just sending the reports over, the agency required me to submit a public records request. The following week, I was copied on an email sent by the agency to the author of the reports (who was employed by a private company that the state contracted with to provide the report). The email notified her of the request and gave her an opportunity to block disclosure. The reports were finally sent to me over a month after my initial request. All of this for a request that should have taken 10 minutes to fulfill.

This is only the most recent example of transparency bottlenecks that seem to have been increasing across several agencies lately. So I was glad to see that the Attorney General’s Office released new Public Records Act model rules for state agencies this week.

Importantly, the model rules suggest that agencies should triage requests “into simple and complex tracks to ensure that processing times are proportionate to the difficulty of each request.” Specifically, if the request is “for a single, specific, readily available, identifiable record, that requires limited review for exempt content, the (name of the agency) will endeavor to produce the request within five business days if practicable to do so.”

Additionally, the model rules suggest that before notifying people that they are named in records that have been requested, agencies “should have a reasonable belief that the records are arguably exempt from disclosure.”

I understand that some public records requests take a lot of staff time to fulfill, and that a narrow request may be at the bottom of a big pile of other requests. Still, it is perplexing that more agencies don’t take the triage approach. Why sit on a narrow request for so long? It leaves the public in the dark for longer than necessary, and it wastes staff time too.

Attorney General Brown said that the model rules change “reduces barriers to information for the public and encourages government agencies to be proactive about transparency, both to better serve their constituents and to stay in compliance with the Public Records Act.” I hope agencies take that to heart (if they haven’t already).