Staffing challenges in some government agencies have made it more difficult for people to obtain public information they have a right to see under state law, as individuals, advocacy groups and media outlets increasingly seek out those records.
Public access to records, from police evidence to employment contracts and much more, is largely guaranteed by Wisconsin law. However, state and city agencies face budgetary constraints and other challenges that can complicate and delay such access.
Records custodians — the people who oversee and process public information requests — must fulfill requests, or give a reason for denying them, “as soon as practicable and without delay,” according to Wisconsin’s open records law.
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But for some agencies, “as soon as practicable” has meant taking more than a year to fulfill some requests. Wisconsin’s vague laws don’t provide a timeline for requests, said Tom Kamenick, founder of the Wisconsin Transparency Project.
“(The statute) doesn’t mean a whole lot as far as calculating anything or trying to figure out if they’re taking too long,” Kamenick said.
Public records advocates have filed a number of lawsuits against local agencies, hoping to speed up the process, most recently on Wednesday when Bill Lueders, a freelance journalist and president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council filed a lawsuit in Dane County Circuit Court seeking to compel the Madison Police Department to fill a request for officer investigations and discipline that he was told could take 14 months.
Records custodians and city officials largely cite staffing shortages and the complexity of requests as the reasons for delays.
“The situation is deeply, deeply problematic,” Lueders said. “Providing records is considered to be one of the most essential functions that a government can perform, and they need to take it seriously.”
The Madison Police Department has struggled to hire enough staff to keep up with a growing backlog of records requests.
In 2022, the department fulfilled more than 32,000 requests for public records, according to Julie Laundrie, a public records custodian at the Madison Police Department. That’s one request every 16 minutes.
The work can require pulling video or audio files from equipment around the city and reviewing content to see what should be redacted. Providing information to the public has long been time-intensive and challenging, Laundrie said, but the situation intensified in 2020.
The department received a “a ton” of public records requests related to the protests and unrest in Madison after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers in 2020, she said.
“Getting through all of that, that’s where, from my perspective, I started to get behind,” Laundrie said. “Then, the more requests that come in, the more behind you get. So now we’re trying to catch up.”
Police departments across the state have had trouble keeping up with requests for body and dashboard camera footage, which can take time to locate and review for people or personal information that needs to be blurred or blacked out, Kamenick said.
Madison police vehicles have dashboard cameras, but officers are not yet equipped with body cameras.
Common problem
The nationwide volume of public records requests grew by 74% and processing time by 112% from 2018 to 2022, according to a public records report compiled by technology firm Granicus that looked into about 240 state, county and city government agencies across the U.S. The file size of response documents more than tripled.
Public Health Madison and Dane County, the city and county’s public health agency, faced an unprecedented spike in public records requests at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with little staff to fulfill them, according to Morgan Finke, an agency spokesperson. That increase led to longer response times in 2020 and 2021.
UW-Madison saw a similar records backlog after the onset of the pandemic, when local and national media, advocacy groups, parents, and local and state officials sought records related to the university’s response, according to UW-Madison spokesperson John Lucas.
“Issues of high interest, which can develop at any time, tend to generate a large volume of complex requests that can impact completion times.” Lucas said in a statement.
The pandemic led to an ongoing queue of about 100 records requests at UW-Madison, many on complex or high-volume topics such as COVID-19 testing results and trends, quarantine policies and remote classes, Lucas said.
Lueders suggested that the heightened demand for information has been driven by a rising distrust in government. “(It’s) this belief that the government is doing things wrong, and I’m gonna catch you at it,” he said.
In 2022, 20% of Americans said they trust the government to do what is right always or most of the time, compared with 42% in 2000 and 77% in 1964, according to a Pew Research Center study.
One effective way to confront government distrust is to ensure people can obtain and can see government records, Lueders said.
More hands on deck
When Laundrie was hired in 2018, the Madison Police Department had two staffers working on records requests. The agency recently hired two program assistants to bring the public records team to 11 full-time employees. Its average response time has fallen from 12 to 14 weeks in 2018 to six to eight weeks today for simpler requests, such as police reports and most requests for police reports with video.
More complicated requests take longer, especially those related to homicides or personnel records. The office sees about 100 requests a year that take significantly longer than average.
Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes recently authorized the public records team to work overtime to clear the backlog of requests, Laundrie said, the goal being to work through outstanding requests from 2022 by the end of September before addressing requests that have accumulated in 2023.
“The backlog is because of the volume and complexity,” Laundrie said.
Madison police are bucking the national trend: The average number of staff handling public records requests fell by 48% from 2018 to 2022, the Granicus report found.
Records custodians earn between $48,000 and $90,000 a year, depending on their position and experience, according to the city of Madison’s careers page. Turnover is a challenge, as many records custodians move on to other positions in law enforcement, law or government, Laundrie said.
Training custodians to review public information and make appropriate redactions can take months. Only one of the recently hired program assistants is partially trained to review personnel records, which make up a large portion of the records backlog, Laundrie said.
Custodians must sort through a hodgepodge of records. Many are stored in an online system. Physical records are spread throughout the City-County Building.
Regardless of staffing and technology, managing records is unpredictable and presents novel requests, even for experienced employees.
“You’re never going to know everything that you can run into,” Laundrie said. “You’re never going to be at the place where you can say, ‘I know exactly how to handle everything.’ And I’m not at that place either.”
$110K salary
At UW-Madison, records custodians face similar challenges, Lucas said, including the identification of relevant privacy laws or laws relating to minors, intellectual property and personal information.
“Becoming proficient in managing public records requests takes many months, and becoming an expert can take years,” Lucas said in a statement.
An active UW-Madison jobs listing that opened Aug. 14 pays $110,000 and requires a bachelor’s degree and at least four years of experience in law, government, compliance or a related field, although candidates with a master’s degree in public administration, a law degree or other advanced degree are preferred.
The UW-Madison records department was able to decrease its response times after increasing staff, a 2020 Wisconsin State Journal analysis found. Roughly 18 months after the office hired a second full-time employee in the fall of 2018, the university reduced its average response time by nearly nine days, from 26.2 to 17.5.
The mismatch between the supply of workers to manage requests and the demand for public information is playing out at city and state agencies across Madison. A job posting for a records clerk at the Madison Metropolitan School District has been active online periodically for months.
But not all agencies deal with the level of complexity that contributes to response delays like those with Madison police or UW-Madison.
Dane County Circuit Court’s records department is usually able to turn around requests in five to 10 days and doesn’t have a backlog, according to records manager Laura Nachazel. The department receives 550 to 700 requests a month, and Court Clerk Carlo Esqueda said staffing and response times haven’t been a problem during his 16-year tenure.
Most of the requests are for copies of documents in court files. Those documents, mostly digitized and contained in the state court systems online database, are relatively easy to access. Redaction is infrequent and only done by a judge’s order, since court records are largely public record. Some old case files are stored off site, adding about a day to acquire, Esqueda said.
Seeking solutions
Some groups have turned to legal action to address delays.
Earlier this month, the Madison School District agreed to pay the Milwaukee-based Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty $18,000 to settle a lawsuit brought after the district failed to fulfill a records request made in January 2022.
As part of the settlement, the district has reportedly agreed to a number of steps to improve its records request process, including meeting with public records clerks from Milwaukee Public Schools, implementing a new system to manage requests and hiring additional staff to reduce its backlog.
Lueders, the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council president, said establishing obligatory response times for particular records requests could help.
In 2016 and 2017, former Gov. Scott Walker issued executive orders aimed at making it easier for the public to find state public records. He directed agencies to post commonly requested documents online and publicize public records request response times, and required agencies to track requests, among other nudges to increase transparency.
But it’s unclear how binding those orders have been, and a report from the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty claims that the Evers administration took down one of the websites Walker created to provide information about transparency practices. Both the Walker and Evers administrations have been criticized and sued over their own handling of public records.
To Lueders, the solution is simple: “If you don’t have the resources to handle records requests properly, devote more resources,” Lueders said.
But that isn’t always possible amid competing demands for taxpayer money. Increasingly, government agencies are turning to digital systems for the public to access records that used to require requests.
Local governments, for example, now routinely publish agendas, meeting minutes and documents online through the Legistar service. The state Department of Public Instruction provides a database listing how much each school district in the state received in federal COVID-19 relief money. And Wisconsin’s Public Service Commission, which oversees public utilities, provides an “e-services” portal where users can search case files.
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