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I am not a lawyer. I am a Madison resident who is curious about how the city spends money and whether it follows its own rules. 

A few years ago, I started writing a blog about Madison city government, focusing on things the mainstream media were not covering. A big part of this involves obtaining records under the state’s open records law. When I want to know what is happening, I ask for the documents, and I read them.

The open records law is built for people like me. It begins with a declaration: “In recognition of the fact that a representative government is dependent upon an informed electorate, it is declared to be the public policy of this state that all persons are entitled to the greatest possible information regarding the affairs of government and the official acts of those officers and employees who represent them.”

Note what it says: all persons. Not just credentialed journalists or licensed lawyers.

Earlier this year, I asked the Madison Police Department for emails regarding a plan to let the department accept training grants without Common Council approval, a special exception unique to that department and apparently contrary to city policy. I was reporting on the proposal. The records arrived in May. They were useful, but the department had blacked out the work email addresses and work phone numbers of several government employees and a contractor doing business with the city.

That looked wrong to me. The open records law has only two provisions that allow a custodian to withhold contact information: sections 19.36(10) and 19.36(11). You can read both on the Wisconsin Legislature’s website. They cover only four things: a person’s home address, home email address, home phone number, and Social Security number. Neither one covers a work email address or a work phone number. You do not need a law degree to read them and see that an official’s city email is not a home address.

And so I pushed back. I wrote to assistant city attorney Adriana Peguero, whose job includes records compliance. I laid out my request, listed the specific redactions, quoted the two provisions, and explained why neither applied. Putting a request for compliance in writing is important because it puts all the facts and the rationale in front of the higher authority.

A couple of weeks later, Peguero replied. “I have discussed this matter with the MPD records custodians,” she wrote, “and they will be working on a new records set for you that discloses these email addresses and phone numbers.” I received the unredacted records the same day.

The whole thing took one letter and some patience. No lawsuit, no lawyer, no fee. It mattered because the result did not depend on special standing or special knowledge. Instead, it came down to a law being clear and a public official being willing to follow it once this was pointed out. That is how the system is supposed to work.

When a government tells you a record is being withheld, that is not the last word. It is one person’s reading, and sometimes it is wrong. You can read the statute yourself, point to the language, and ask someone with authority to take another look. Often, that is enough.

The information belongs to you. The law says so. Ask and you shall receive.

Your Right to Know is a monthly column distributed by the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council (wisfoic.org), a nonprofit, nonpartisan group dedicated to open government. Madison resident Alex Saloutos is a native of Madison, a licensed real estate agent and publisher of the blog 77SquareMiles.com.

Your Right to Know: Anyone can lay down the law on open records is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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The two most common complaints I hear from people seeking public records are “Why is it taking so long?” and “Why does it cost so much?” Unfortunately, it’s often difficult to mount a successful legal challenge to delays or fees because of the way the state’s laws are worded.

Wisconsin’s Open Records Law imposes no deadline on producing records. All it says is they must be produced “as soon as practicable and without delay.” What does that actually mean? While the state Department of Justice recommends that simple requests receive a response within 10 business days, the DOJ itself doesn’t heed its own advice, often taking months — even years — to fulfill requests.

Courts haven’t given much guidance. They’ve essentially said it’s a reasonableness test that takes into account the size and complexity of the request, the resources of the government agency, and whether they are making a good faith effort to comply. But how long is too long? 

Ideally, we’d have a deadline in our law, as some other states do. This may require prioritizing resources properly, which should already be happening. Fulfilling record requests, the law says, is “an essential function of a representative government and an integral part of the routine duties” of public officials.” And yet I’ve seen agencies with budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars who have one person doing this work.

The other common problem with the records law is it allows custodians to charge fees for complying with records requests. Here, I am especially concerned about “location” fees. The government can charge for the “actual, necessary and direct cost” of finding records, typically at the hourly rate of the lowest-paid employee capable of searching. But sometimes this is still a considerable amount, and some custodians even want to charge for employees’ benefits.

This amounts to, essentially, the government getting paid twice for the same work. Our taxes already pay the salary or wage of the employee searching for records. The requester pays them again.

Permitting location fees also incentivizes government agencies to be sloppy in their recordkeeping. The more disorganized their records are, the longer it will take them to find records, so the more money they can collect from requesters. Those high costs also discourage requesters from following through with requests.  

For example, I’ve run into police departments that still store their personnel records in paper boxes, so if somebody wants, say, disciplinary records, the department can quote an often prohibitively high price to search each box for disciplinary files. Even if records are stored electronically, they can be hard to retrieve if they are not sensibly organized.

How can we fix these twin problems? If I were in charge (and I’m not), I’d put a strict deadline in the law and eliminate location fees altogether. But realistically, we are unlikely to see either reform. 

Perhaps a more practical solution would be to tie the two problems together. Change the law so that custodians can charge location costs only if the records are produced within a strict deadline — perhaps 10 business days.  

That compromise would incentivize better, more organized record keeping. Government agencies would now want to keep their records — especially those people frequently request — arranged in ways easy to search and easy to find. It would also incentivize them to devote enough resources to fulfill record requests promptly.  

The result? Requesters will get records faster and cheaper, and government agencies might also see a net increase in revenue, as more requesters opt to pay for prompt service rather than walk away.

Pairing these two issues is an idea worth pursuing.

Your Right to Know is a monthly column distributed by the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council (wisfoic.org), a group dedicated to open government. Tom Kamenick, a council member, is the president and founder of the Wisconsin Transparency Project.

Your Right to Know: How to solve high record costs and long delays is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.