On the Record. Public Information in North Texas How some local governments are violating the law and the public’s trust in records requests Yearlong Dallas Morning News study finds inconsistent handling of requests, systemic violations

On the Record. Create, track, support and share requests for public records from government agencies in Dallas-Fort Worth and Texas. Related content Compliance rankings: See which government agencies passed or failed with our interactive scorecard. The cost of queries: When public agencies ask outside council to respond to open records queries, they do so at taxpayer expense. Editorial: When open government isn’t open Editor’s note: How transparent is your community? Richard Miles was early into a 60-year sentence when he first entered the law library at the maximum-security Coffield Unit in Tennessee Colony, southeast of Dallas. Imprisoned for the murder of one man and the attempted murder of another, he pored over case law, learned to petition for a writ of habeas corpus and hoped for a second chance to clear his name. He needed his court transcripts to prove his innocence, but without the money to pay for them, he was denied the information. Miles asked his father to send a Texas Public Information Act request to the Dallas Police Department. He received just part of his case file. But in 2007, prisoner advocacy group Centurion Ministries took up Miles’ case, and a second open records request for the same file yielded a very different result. The information — originally withheld from Miles’ defense counsel — would reveal someone else was implicated in the crimes. “It was like a ray of hope,” he said. In a yearlong study, The Dallas Morning News looked at access to public information at more than 100 government entities across North Texas. The News’ investigation found that despite recent strides to update the Texas Public Information Act in concert with advances in technology, uncertainty remains among North Texas governmental agencies over how to interpret the statute. The result: inconsistent treatment of the release of public information, giving rise to systemic violations of the law. Among The News’ findings: Widely varied costs for basic information, ranging from free to thousands of dollars.

Routine flouting of the law’s response time deadlines.

An inability or refusal to provide some or all information about public expenditures in a searchable, electronic format. Government officials and transparency activists alike regard the Texas Public Information Act as one of the most comprehensive laws of its kind in the U.S. The law allows citizens to look into government, and to determine how their tax dollars are being spent. But inside the act are possible loopholes and ambiguities, each with the potential to stymie those trying to seek information to which they are entitled by law. Records custodians must comply with the Public Information Act while trying to work within the constraints of an agency’s infrastructure. The statute’s critics say uniform application of the act is made difficult thanks to the law’s complexity. And with a new Legislature in session this month  and the state Senate’s decision Wednesday to eliminate its open government committee  freedom of information advocates say improvements must be made to the law to steel it against misuse. Attorney Bill Aleshire “The behavior is to try to make compliance with the Public Information Act as cumbersome, expensive and as much of a hassle for the government as they can, because [government agencies] think they’re going to get a sympathetic ear from the Legislature as a result of that tactic,” said Bill Aleshire, an Austin attorney who handles freedom of information cases. “I’m hoping that that’s not going to be successful, and that people will realize that you don’t have government by the people and for the people, you have only government of the people when the people can’t see what’s going on inside the government.” The study The News’ investigation focused on public officials’ compliance with the state’s open records law by examining ease of access to public information on the Web, and by mapping responses to open records requests. Grades were assigned for all 113 agencies in the report. The Public Information Act requires a government entity to respond to a request within 10 business days. Agencies then must “promptly produce” information, “within a reasonable time, without delay.” The records custodian may not ask why a person is requesting the information, and all requests must be treated uniformly. If the agency can’t turn over the requested documents within the 10-day period, the records custodian must let the requester know, and “set a date and hour within a reasonable time when the information will be available for inspection or duplication.” But a number of factors may lead to a delay in the release of records. A public agency may seek a ruling from the attorney general within the 10-day period to determine whether it can withhold the information, pausing the clock until the AG responds. And in 2010, the Texas Supreme Court ruled that the 10-day period is reset once a public agency seeks clarification from a requester. Watching the clock Of the more than 500 open records requests sent during The News’ study, the time from when an open records request was sent and when an initial response was received varied greatly. On average, 21 percent of all requests sent received an initial response outside the 10-business day window required by law. Many requests required sending one or more reminder emails to the government agency before a response was received. Over the course of a year, The News sent a series of five different records requests to 113 governmental entities. Performance improved slightly over the course of the study. In the first round of open records requests, just over 75 percent of the entities queried responded on time. By the fifth round of requests, the average compliance rate hovered around 80 percent.

Jim Moll fills out an open records request as Jeri Carter Lawson, open records manager, waits at the city of Dallas’ public information office in City Hall. The Texas Public Information Act requires a government entity to respond to an open records request within 10 business days.

Receiving the information took longer. Information was sent within the 10-day period, on average, 61 percent of the time. Of the agencies that provided information, most produced the records promptly, many times within two weeks of a request. But information sent in response to around 20 percent of The News’ 565 requests came after waiting more than 10 days. A handful of requests were fulfilled a month or more after they were sent. And 80 requests went unfulfilled, due to silence on the part of the agency, a refusal to release information, a statement that the information wasn’t available, or a cost estimate that was prohibitively high. Each time a cost was assessed, The News made an effort to reduce the expense in accordance with the law. When responses were late, most records custodians blamed the lag on faulty email systems or other computer malfunctions. Cost estimates for the information were similarly unpredictable. Some public entities sought to charge for requests after first sending a response outside of the 10-day window required by law. Several failed to follow cost guidelines. Others charged large labor fees for records that were readily accessible at most other agencies, or for 50 or fewer pages of paper documents, an action typically prohibited by law. The first request sent by The News sought information outlined in the Public Information Act that is informally known as “super public”: the name, sex, ethnicity, salary, title and dates of employment of each employee and officer of a governmental body. While most agencies released the information for free, a few charged for the data. Some maintained that the law mandated charges for public information. “The only thing you can get for free is if you ask for an ordinance or something like that,” said Terry Smith, who has been city secretary in Sachse for 20 years. Most expensive cost estimates for processing records requests 1 Richardson ISD $4,050  2 Lancaster ISD $1,800  3 Wylie $1,648 † 4 Gunter ISD $1,500 to $3,000 * 5 Irving ISD $970  6 Duncanville $720  7 Richardson $630.60  8 Plano $600-750 * 9 Red Oak ISD $540  10 Sunnyvale $360 * 11 Highland Park $315 †* 12 Little Elm $275.30 †  For a list of employee expense reimbursements † For a list of open records requests received with information showing how many requests were referred to the attorney general * Government agency later sent some or all information for free “I have people all the time come in and ask for the world thinking everything’s free,” he said. “Then when all of a sudden when I tell them, oh, it’s going to cost $18 or $20 or something, it’s like their world ends.” The city of Coppell provided some information for free, but said it would have to charge $120 for additional data. City Secretary Christel Pettinos told The News in an email that “the charges were for 600 pages of redactions and three hours of work” because the city’s existing reports did not contain information about race and gender. Because the Public Information Act specifies that governmental agencies do not have to create a record that doesn’t already exist, The News asked for agencies to provide information in the format it was kept in if it was not available electronically. When asked for a list of employee reimbursements in 2013, some agencies held that the information was only available in hard copy. The News’ most expensive estimate was a $4,050 fee from Richardson ISD for that information. The district maintained that data showing the amount of money paid to reimburse employees wasn’t available electronically.

The Richardson Independent School District had the most expensive estimate — $4,050 — in response to a request for a list of employee reimbursements. The district maintained that such data wasn’t available electronically.

“I think the way we keep our receipts is the problem, because we don’t scan them in as we get the charges,” said records custodian Charlotte Cupaioli, who noted the charge was a “conservative estimate.” Large fees Whether costly or nominal, fees can sometimes deter people from getting the information they need. The Public Information Act allows a government agency to waive charges for records if it determines release of the information is “in the public interest.” But the practice is increasingly rare, and large fees are becoming the norm, Aleshire said. When Richard Miles was behind bars, the sheer cost of the information he requested — his court transcripts — was a hurdle he couldn’t overcome. Miles said another inmate, Rickey Dale Wyatt, who was exonerated in December, helped him with the steps necessary to make his way back outside. But without the documents to look into Miles’ case, Wyatt’s research knowledge was all Miles initially had in the fight to obtain his freedom. It’s a battle most exonerees have faced, Miles said. Miles’ father also filed an open records request for his son’s information at the Dallas Police Department. He, too, had difficulty paying the bill. Just a portion of the file was released, Miles said. But when Centurion Ministries took up Miles’ case and filed yet another open records request, a record of an anonymous phone call to Dallas police surfaced.

Richard Miles spent 15 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. His experiences with open records requests for his case file were mixed.