By Marit Gookin
The Ranger
Via- Wyoming News Exchange
RIVERTON — When Converse County resident Brandi Sorensen’s son was reportedly targeted by a stalker, she and her family wanted answers about the case against his stalker. First, she said, law enforcement kept them in the dark because it regarded her son as a reporting party rather than a victim; when new evidence emerged, the family was assured it would get answers once the case was through the court system.
Then, an answer came: The police had determined that it would be contrary to the public interest to allow the Sorensens to see the records. The Sorensen family wouldn’t be getting any other answers about what happened with their son’s case or why what little they had been told didn’t line up with what was said in court.
Wyoming state statute allows government agencies to deny access to records if it’s deemed to be in the public interest to keep them confidential – but it doesn’t define what public interest means. It’s one of a number of loopholes present in the statute regarding public records that the Wyoming State Legislature’s Corporations, Elections, and Political Subdivisions Committee has heard repeatedly over the past few years are frequently used to deny, frustrate, overcharge for, or simply ignore requests.
Under current statute, there’s no recourse for mishandled public records requests – unless the requester is willing to take the government in question to court, pursuing a fine that tops out at $750.
On the other hand, local governments and their representatives have argued, some requests are genuinely exorbitant. Data mining, the rise of AI-created requests and nuisance requests are all problems which public records custodians have to grapple with, the committee has heard.
In the midst of the back-and-forth, those on both sides have found some common ground: The public records ombudsman’s office needs more resources and more authority, the committee has heard, and there is little objection to a proposed bill looking to secure just that.
LSO 80
Out of two years of testimony, research, debate, and working groups, the Legislative Service Office developed LSO 80, an update to Wyoming’s Public Records Act that would create new, tighter timelines for fulfilling requests, create a standardized fee schedule, and separate out commercial versus non-commercial requests.
At its recent meeting in Casper, the Corporations committee heard a series of requests for amendments from both opponents and supporters of the draft legislation.
Many of the objections to LSO 80 focused on its proposed timeline changes.
Government officials and organizations argued that the reduced timelines laid out in the current bill draft could prove onerous for Wyoming’s smaller governments, as most public records custodians have a number of other duties.
For his part, Goldwater Institute Staff Attorney Parker Jackson noted that his organization has no objection to continuing to use the existing timelines – with the addition of a specific timeframe within which a request must be acknowledged, currently missing from Wyoming state statute. Additionally, Jackson said, he’d like to see the language creating different timelines for commercial versus non-commercial requests removed and replaced with language creating different fee schedules for the two categories.
He also proposed closing a current loophole in state statute regarding fees for electronic records.
Right now, Wyoming governments can charge essentially any amount they choose for electronic records; the only stipulation is that they should be “reasonable,” a term not defined by either statute or case law.
In practice, as Jackson and others have testified and as this newspaper has demonstrated, this creates situations where some entities will occasionally charge thousands of dollars to fulfill what should be a relatively simple request, often in the form of passing along the cost of having an attorney review the documents.
Jackson suggested that for non-commercial requests, electronic records should be free to review just as physical records are. If the requester is asking for the production of physical documents or something similar, he said, then charges could apply.
Additionally, he said, language should be added exempting non-commercial requests from fees related to searching for and redaction of records; the ombudsman bill’s addition of an attorney position associated with that office, he pointed out, could help alleviate the legal concerns and costs for local governments.
Other language brought by Jackson included some fencing-in of who is affected by the commercial language, saying that it’s important to ensure that the press and public interest groups aren’t caught up in it, and that a line about the ombudsman being able to allow for higher fees should only apply to commercial requests.
Fremont County Clerk Julie Freese said that as LSO 80 is currently written, many counties may have to hire more people in order to comply.
“The requests are becoming more involved with AI and with multiple layers of asking, that they are taking a significant amount away from our daily jobs,” she told the committee. “Some of the clerk’s offices that we’re concerned about are minimally staffed, and public records are a heavy lift.”
“There is one individual that has put in 125 requests at this point, many of which are extensions of the previous request that the entity is trying to request and provide to them,” Public Records Ombudsman Darlena Potter testified, and the requester in question not only refuses to modify the request but has also harassed staff members by filing frivolous complaints.
Public interest
Brian Farmer with the Wyoming School Boards Association pointed out that there are three categories of records maintained by governments in statute: Records which must be released, records which may not be released if the government determines it not to be in the public interest to do so, and records which must not be released.
Farmer made the case that some records not specifically outlined as those which must be kept confidential should nonetheless not be widely publicly released, using the example of a school’s vulnerability assessment.
The topic of records requests that can be denied if they are deemed to be in the public interest to keep them secret was brought back up by Sorensen.
“The reason I want to talk about the law enforcement portion of the public records act is that it has been used to penalize crime victims or members of the public who ask questions. I know this is a problem because my family has lived it,” she said.
Last year, she testified to elected officials about revisions she’d like to see to Wyoming’s laws concerning stalking and grooming of minors.
“What you don’t know,” she told the committee, “is our advocacy resulted in law enforcement and the prosecutor’s office stonewalling our access to our criminal case records.”
Originally, her family had been told it would have more access to information regarding her son’s case once it was through the court system.
“Those promises were broken, and goalposts kept moving,” she told the committee. When the family’s victim advocate tried to request the records in question, Sorensen said, she was denied – something which had never happened before. The agency cited the public interest exemption, she said.
“It’s a subjective shield. When an agency invokes public interest, the burden shifts entirely onto the victim,” she said.
Sorensen requested that the committee consider removing the vague term “public interest” and replacing it with more objective, definable standards.
‘This bill’s not ready’
There was little opposition to LSO 81, the bill concerning the ombudsman’s office, Committee Chairman Sen. Cale Case, R-Lander, noted. Rep. Tony Locke, R-Casper, said he had some concerns about the bill, as it seems to create more government. He said he’d prefer to wait to vote on LSO 81 until the next meeting.
A few other legislators agreed with Locke’s suggestion to wait to vote on whether to back LSO 81 and allow for some of the suggestions made by the governor’s office to be incorporated, and that was eventually the consensus that emerged.
LSO 80 is a different story.
“I can see the strategy here from the school board association, from Mr. Brubaker – just, you know, ‘this bill’s not ready.’ And I can hear it from the committee, ‘three weeks is too short,'” Case remarked. “Unless we want to force the issue somehow – and they don’t seem to care much about separating out commercial from non-commercial – then we’re not going to have a bill. It just gets too complicated, and I don’t know the path forward … I’d like to hear from people how we can get a bill.”
Locke also argued that LSO 80 needs significant work, including in terms of how fees can be applied to commercial requesters and in terms of ensuring that language about being able to deny fraudulent requests can’t be weaponized against genuine requesters.
Both bill drafts will be carried forward to the Corporations committee’s next meeting.
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