Cities groan under weight of huge public records requests

Sixteen years ago, Scott Spence went to work for the city of Lacey. He worked in public affairs, then moved up to assistant city manager and eventually rose to become city manager in 2011.

Now, someone has requested every record produced by him during his Lacey employment. The request has so far generated 55,000 records, he said.

And that’s not the only large public records request the city is trying to process.

The other is a copy of every photo in the city’s possession going back to the 1960s. The city estimates it has about 80,000 photos, about half of which were photos from the Lacey Leader, a former weekly newspaper that is now archived at the Lacey Museum.

It is those requests, on top of about 4,500 other much smaller requests the city received in 2016, that have Spence and other Lacey officials seeking relief from the Legislature. Something needs to be done to update the state’s Public Records Law for the information age, Spence said.

“There has to be a structure that says not all public records requests are created equal,” he said.

Lacey has been the target of more burdensome requests than other Thurston County governments. While an Olympian investigation shows thousands of public records requests were made to county and city governments, the Port of Olympia and law enforcement agencies in 2016, most were easily fulfilled, many within 24 hours. Most are for specific and routine information, such as accident or police reports.

Spence acknowledged that state law regarding public records is fundamentally sound, and that people have a right to know what’s going on with their local government. But the law, which was approved by voters in 1972, was built for another time, a time when people got out their typewriter and thought carefully about a specific records request, he said.

“The volume was manageable,” Spence said.

Now, in the age of the internet, people fire off emails that lack specifics, or are too broad and take too long to fulfill, Spence said.

The burden of those requests has led the city to hire a records assistant at a cost of about $50,000 a year, while additional requests are handled by the city clerk and deputy city clerk. Spence estimates Lacey will spend about $250,000 to purchase and implement a content management software system to better handle records. That is expected to be in place by 2018, he said.

But Spence said the issue isn’t just the costs. Overbroad requests for information take staff time away from fulfilling realistic requests. Of the 4,500 received by the city last year, about 90 percent were completed in a typical working day, he said.

That type of request might be someone in search of a City Council agenda from 2014 or a real estate plan from 2005, Spence said.

The Olympian filed a records request to the city for a log of all public records requests made in 2016, but Spence said the city doesn’t keep a running tally of requests. The city’s main departments have records coordinators.

The Requester

Justin Kover said he has filed dozens of records requests over the years. You might recognize the name: Kover has run for elected office in Thurston County and was once part of a group that urged Lacey City Council to put its plastic bag ban to a vote of Lacey residents.

Since then, Kover has graduated from law school and become an attorney, according to the Washington State Bar Association.

Kover said he filed those requests because of an interest in politics and city and county policies.

But he also filed a request with Lacey seeking all city documents with Councilman Michael Steadman’s name on them. He did that because Kover and others thought they had won Steadman’s promise via social media to support a plastic bag ban vote. Steadman later voted against putting it to a vote of Lacey residents, saying he did not make that promise.

In an era of “fake news,” Kover said, “public records provide a source of credible information.”

“If he’s going to be blatantly dishonest to me,” said Kover about Steadman, “how is that reflected in his city business?”

“We have the means to see what they’re doing and hold them accountable,” he said about records and public officials.

Kover said Lacey is one of the better jurisdictions he has worked with on records requests. His Steadman request resulted in 15,000 emails and documents.

At the same time, he said he’s not too sympathetic to claims of records requests being a burden on local governments. “Their job is to provide information,” he said.

And he questioned that burden. Under the law, public agencies and others have five days to acknowledge receipt of the request and provide an estimate on when it will be filled. Records also can be released in installments.

Kover said the law already provides some flexibility.

Port of Olympia

Despite controversies over the shipping of fracking sand and possible military shipments, the Port of Olympia received just 64 public records requests in 2016.

And yet that’s a lot for the port, which, prior to 2006, had hardly any, said Jeri Sevier, the port’s human resource and administrative manager and former public records officer.

Although the port has never had a full-time position devoted to records requests, it did hire a records coordinator to convert port records to a digital format, but requests took up half of her time, Sevier said.

That person recently left the port, and now the job has fallen to an existing port staffer, Sevier said.

The port takes records requests much more seriously since it learned a hard lesson in 2006, when an intern was handling requests, Sevier said. That was about the time the port and Weyerhaeuser had struck a lease agreement for the log export business at the marine terminal.

Open government advocate Arthur West filed a records request about the lease, and the intern withheld some records. West filed suit, and a judge later determined the records were not exempt and could not be withheld.

“We pay more attention to public records” now, Sevier said.

Like Lacey, the electronic age hasn’t made requests easy. People request all manner of information, and it’s harder, it seems, for people to be specific, she said.

Some requests have resulted in stories in The Olympian. For example, emails requested by Robert Gorrill concerning possible military shipments were shared with the paper.

When The Olympian requested a log of public records requests for 2016, the port responded the same day.

Requests to law enforcement

Police departments receive hundreds — sometimes thousands — of public records requests every year.

Many are from people requesting collision reports to be used for insurance claims. Others request police reports for incidents involving themselves, friends or family members.

In 2016, the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office received more than 3,400 public records requests, according to Judy Leeson, who recently retired from the Sheriff’s Office’s records department. Because there were so many requests, and the request information isn’t stored in a records log, The Olympian was unable to go through all of the information.

The Tumwater Police Department received 1,248 public records requests last year, and the Lacey Police Department also received a high volume of requests. Neither agency keeps a log of the requests, but records clerks from both departments are working to provide The Olympian with copies of requests.

The Olympia Police Department received about 1,600 public records requests last year, a log shows. A majority are from people requesting records for insurance purposes, but a few requests bucked the trend.

One man filed 53 public records requests asking for all collision reports during various time periods. Another man made 46 requests asking for the same records.

Neither man responded to phone calls from The Olympian asking about the requests.

A year after the May 21, 2015, shooting involving an Olympia police officer and two men who allegedly attacked him with a skateboard, people were still filing public records requests regarding the incident.

Several people also filed requests regarding a Feb. 29, 2016, incident involving a man who died in police custody at the Olympia Transit Center.

In high-profile cases in which many people ask for the same information, the Olympia Police Department has set up webpages where they upload relevant public records. That happened with the shooting and the Transit Center death. Links to both pages can still be found in the upper right corner of the Police Department’s website.

Official statements, video, investigation findings, dispatch audio, and Police Department demographics were all uploaded to the officer-involved shooting page. The result was that Thurston County residents were able to receive this information without filing a request.

“We see it as a best practice in law enforcement right now, to keep the door open and the communication flowing,” said Olympia Police Lt. Paul Lower.

In the wake of the shooting, department officials tried to put out as much unedited information as possible, he said.

“We had a situation that was right there on the edge of all that national attention,” Lower said. “We knew it was important to put out information that hadn’t been editorialized.”

Lower said he’s found that open communication has helped develop community trust. And since the shooting, the Olympia Police Department has been contacted by other agencies asking for advice.

Olympia and Tumwater

Olympia received about 2,500 records requests in 2016, most of them seeking police reports.

Public records are sought not just by everyday citizens, but also by attorneys and businesses in the course of their work. Multiple requests were made by social service workers and Child Protective Service investigators with the Department of Social and Health Services, seeking records such as police reports and no-contact orders for specific individuals.

Norah West, media relations manager with DSHS, said investigators use public records as part of their daily work to keep children safe and assist families. Investigators use these records to verify information and to gather any new details for a case.

“By and large, we find it very easy to work with cities,” West told The Olympian. “The formal records requests are a parallel process to the daily working relationships we have with our partners.”

Not counting requests to the Police Department, Tumwater received 125 records requests in 2016. The most common requests were reports on fires and property records such as building permits, site plans, code violations and water-related information.

Melody Valiant, city clerk in Tumwater, suggests being as specific as possible when requesting records. Otherwise, city staff may spend extra time clarifying the request or searching for unwanted records.

The public also is encouraged to fill out the city-provided form that’s available online, rather than simply emailing or faxing a request.

“If it’s a large request, it is helpful to pick up the installments shortly after the records are available so that staff know the requester is still interested in having them sort through the next installment of records, which can be hundreds of thousands of records to complete the request,” Valiant said.

Thurston County

With 24 departments handling their own records, it’s hard to get a feel for just how many public records requests were made to Thurston County government last year.

About 440 requests came through the county’s main records email address alone — but people also are able to make requests to departments individually, said Robin Courts, records coordinator for the Board of County Commissioners. She’s also responsible for making sure that requests made to the main email make it where they need to go.

“The county is diverse in that each elected official can run their department however they want,” Courts said. “That means they all have different ways of managing their records.”

The commissioners’ office doesn’t receive nearly as many requests as other agencies, she said. People tend to file requests when they’re upset about a decision. And even then, records typically need to come from several departments.

More often, people request information about tax parcels, building permits and health records.

To coordinate efforts, all of the county’s records coordinators meet monthly with an attorney from the Thurston County Prosecutor’s Office’s civil division. And while departments differ in methods, they all have one goal, Courts said.

“Our goal is to provide all the records we can and make is as public a process as possible,” Courts said.

The job is most challenging for records coordinators when people don’t really know what they’re looking for, Courts said. But, they’ll try to work with requesters to figure it out.

This story was originally published March 11, 2017 at 7:20 AM with the headline "Cities groan under weight of huge public records requests."