Cities across the Pacific Northwest are struggling to handle a growing number of requests for public records such as court documents, police reports and emails between public officials. To test those systems, the investigative news outlet InvestigateWest sent the same records request to 15 cities across Oregon, Washington and Idaho. Some took months or charged hundreds of dollars to fulfill the requests.
Daniel Walters reports on democracy and extremism for InvestigateWest. He joins us to share more about what he found and the vital role public records play in holding governments and agencies accountable.
Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Cities across the Pacific Northwest are struggling to handle a growing number of requests for public records, things like court documents, police reports or emails between public officials. To test those systems, the news outlet InvestigateWest sent the same records requests to 15 cities across Oregon, Washington and Idaho. Some took months or charged hundreds of dollars to fulfill those requests. Daniel Walters reports on democracy and extremism for InvestigateWest. He joins us to share more about what he found and why it matters. Daniel, welcome back to the show.
Daniel Walters: Hi, [Dave]. Appreciate it.
Miller: Journalists obviously know about and use public records requests a lot, but how might “regular” people use them?
Walters: Yeah, I like to think about “normal” people that don’t include politicians or journalists. I’ve seen people that, sometimes it’s just a simple matter of wanting a divorce records, or I saw a situation with a mom who wanted a police record to see if her kid had been arrested. I even saw a situation where an older man who was about 100 years old, a developer who is well known in the Boise area, ended up falling and the firefighters helped him, rescued him after he fell. And he was using the public records just to try to figure out who the firefighters were who were responding to his problems so they could thank him.
So, they can be used for wholesome reasons or for angry reasons, or all sorts of reasons. But basically, almost any email, any written correspondence by public officials, almost all of that is theoretically available to the public to see.
Miller: That “theoretically,” was doing a lot of work in that last sentence, though. Just in your own experience as a reporter, how have records request fulfillments changed over the last few years?
Walters: I think we’ve seen the situation where it’s gotten slowly more difficult to actually get the records request. It’s a matter of, you’ll still eventually get … I haven’t seen any decrease in the amount of records that are given to me, or the availability of records, but it just takes a lot longer. So you might be in a situation where we’re seven months out from the election and I won’t bother putting in a records request in Spokane for something involving the mayor, because I know I’m not going to get the records request back in time before the election.
Miller: How did you go about testing various cities’ records request processes?
Walters: I ended up just sending the same … I came up with two records requests, and sent them to 15 different cities – the five largest cities in Washington, Oregon and Idaho. The first records request I sent was basically a record for a little over a year of the records logs, basically to see the records requests that everyone else was making in those regions. And the second records request, which I intended to be a little bit more difficult and time consuming, was basically all the emails and text messages to and from the mayor, and also to and from a city manager or city administrator.
Miller: What did you find out, first of all, in terms of which cities took the longest to respond?
Walters: We saw a dramatic disparity. The longest to respond was the city of Spokane, which basically took over four months to give me that first records request for the records log. I still haven’t gotten the full response to the second request. So I’m still waiting on the second request, long after almost every other city responded and provided that. Dramatic contrast with Vancouver, that got me everything that I asked for in only eight days, counting Christmas.
Miller: Eight days in Vancouver and four-plus months ... or actually, you’re still waiting for one of the requests in Spokane.
Walters: Absolutely. I put those requests in in December, so we’re coming up on eight months here for that full request.
Miller: What can that kind of delay mean for, I don’t know, journalists on deadline, or a lawyer in discovery, or just somebody looking for somebody to thank?
Walters: Well, for journalists, it’s pretty much always frustrating. I mean, the news has to be new. For example, I’ve been waiting since 2021 for some records related to accusations against former Spokane city administrator, Johnny Perkins. If I got those records today, I probably wouldn’t be able to do a story on it, first of all, because I’m no longer at the publication that I was at when I made those requests, but second of all, because he’s no longer the city administrator. The mayor is no longer the mayor. Things change over the period of four years, and we want to try to get those requests. Say an election happens and there’s information for that request that you get that could have changed people’s votes. We’ve seen that happen in places like Spokane.
For a lawyer, that delay could actually be something they want though. They’ve told me that, at times, they’re actually looking for a reason to slow down the case for certain attorneys. So they’re not always upset about it, but for journalists, it’s almost always frustrating and it discourages us from making as many record requests as we should.
Miller: Well, what recourse do you have, do other folks have, if a public agency is dragging their feet or coming up with lots of reasons why specific aspects of what’s being asked for cannot be approved?
Walters: We can play good cop, bad cop. I mean, the bad cop solution is to threaten lawsuits. Sometimes you can actually sue, you’ve seen media outlets do that. A lot of times the best thing to do if you have a good relationship with the city clerk, to call them and ask them if there’s anything you can do to hasten the request. Ask them, “Hey, can I narrow the request? Can I find a way to push the request a little further?”
A lot of times, the clerks end up doing more work than you want them to, and if they knew what exactly you wanted, or if they could find that document, it could save them a lot of time and you a lot of time. And so I do find that to be effective, if possible. But otherwise, if you’re not willing to sue and the city is not willing to negotiate with you, or you can’t negotiate with them, you’re kind of out of luck.
Miller: Your request for those records request logs was handy, because it was both a way to test the responsiveness of these different cities’ systems, but also the information that you eventually got, it’s interesting, it tells its own story. What stands out to you in what you found out about other requests?
Walters: The other requests – I guess what really surprised me was, I was expecting a lot of citizen requests, a lot of journalist requests, probably some trolls and stalkers. We saw that too. But what really surprised me was the sheer number of requests from these companies that are data brokers, like LexisNexis and Metro Reporting. There’s these big huge companies that want to hoover up as many public records as possible, and use those to sell back to their clients, in particular, insurance agencies.
So every single time there’s a car wreck or a car accident or a collision in Portland, one or multiple of these agencies will try to get the public records request on that. Literally, there’s hundreds of thousands of these requests in some cases, in some of these larger cities. And at times, it’s really become a burden on the system. I mean, that’s not something that people usually talk about, because the individual requests are so tiny, but the aggregate is so problematic.
Miller: Can you just get a rough sense for the ratio here? Because I gotta say that this was a surprise to me. When I think of public records requests, I primarily think about journalists, maybe that’s just my own myopic view of the world, where journalists play a prominent role in society. And in recent years, I’ve heard more about trolls, stalkers and people trying to, I guess, sometimes intentionally gum up the work of government…
Walters: I have a nickname for those … “vexatious requesters” … which I kind of appreciate.
Miller: That’s a nickname? “Vexatious” is a nickname? OK, it seems more …
Walters: It’s the kind of term that they use, right?
Miller: But what percentage are actually companies that are using this long standing public request law, set of laws, just to make money on their own?
Walters: Portland was actually helpful because they sent me a lot of these requests. Just to give a sense, only 1.5% to 2% of the requests, typically, that we’ve seen come from media types. There’s a lot more that comes from members of the public.
But if you talk about the requests that people are paying for in Portland, there was over $111,000, I believe, shelled out by one requester from LexisNexis in 2023 for the city of Portland. And so basically, they’re spending a fortune to get all this information. And that is over a quarter of all of the requests that are paid for in Portland. So it’s always hard to see exactly, just off the top of my head, what those figures are. But, it’s significant.
Miller: Oregon and Washington obviously are blue states. Idaho is red. Broadly, do you see different approaches to public records requests, based on the party that’s dominant in the state?
Walters: That’s a great question. I think what I’ve seen increasingly, is actually something a little bit different. The more a state is competitive, in terms of whether the Republican has a chance of winning, the Democrat has a chance of winning, the more there’s going to be an incentive and support for transparency in public records.
But the more the state becomes a one-party state, which has happened in Washington, which has happened in Oregon, which has happened in Idaho, the more public records just become a hassle or a nuisance for legislators. They know it’s not something they’re going to be able to expose their opponent and win. They know they’re going to win anyways. They know they’re going to have control, anyway. So public records are just these things that become a hassle for them.
When I’ve talked to experts, that’s something they’re concerned about, too. As we’ve seen people in these partisan states [and] states become more and more partisan in one area or another, we’re beginning to see a loss of support for public records. That’s especially true when we have situations where you have organizations like Moms for Liberty, which is a right wing group that’s really, really critical of school boards and school systems, trying to make these big requests for all the mentions of critical race theory in the district, or things like that. And so they become a real headache. Then these public officials start to look for solutions, they start to call public records requests, compare it to harassment, compare it to malicious behavior, because they don’t believe there’s necessarily a benefit for them. And that’s a concern.
Miller: Just briefly, where does this leave us? Do you have thoughts about how we maintain access to public records without overburdening public agencies? How do you thread that needle?
Walters: Yeah, I think that it is a challenge because I think that anytime you introduce more complexity into a system, it actually slows things down, as opposed to speeding things up. I think what legislators probably need to do is they need to go back and try to simplify the record system in the same way that people talk about simplifying the tax code.
The record systems have become just extraordinarily complicated. There’s over like 600 exemptions in Washington state for all these individual records. So by going back and simplifying it, maybe taking out some of those exemptions can actually speed up the system and make things a lot easier for the cities involved. Other than that, I think it’s just a matter of cities and other agencies spending the time and the money to invest in their record systems.
Miller: Daniel, thanks very much.
Walters: I appreciate it.
Miller: Daniel Walters is a democracy and extremism reporter at InvestigateWest.
Contact “Think Out Loud®”
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983. The call-in phone number during the noon hour is 888-665-5865.