Governments in Texas Ask to Keep More Records From the Public

When Texans ask state and local officials for public records detailing their operations, more and more the answer is no.The reason why is in dispute — in part because of the lack of some public records.Checks cut by a school board, tapes of 911 emergency calls and text messages between city council members are among the materials that are, in theory, publicly available.A quirk of the Texas open records law, adopted almost 45 years ago, says that when officials deny the public the right to see something, they usually have to run that decision by the state attorney general’s office.The Dallas Morning News examined data on denials as part of an annual project known as Sunshine Week, which the American Society of News Editors started in 2005. News organizations across the country report on the health of the nation’s open records laws, focusing on ways to improve government transparency.In Texas, the number of record-request denials has been soaring. In 2001, governments forwarded 6,149 denied record requests to the attorney general’s office for review and received a ruling from Austin. That number jumped to 27, 383 in 2015. Much of the increase has occurred in the last decade.The overall number of denials is actually larger than the data indicate. More than 80 agencies and local governments have received permission from the attorney general to automatically deny certain kinds of requests, such as those that reveal a person’s birth date.Some experts say the prevailing attitude among governments in Texas has turned from a presumption that records should almost always be available to a belief that officials should release as little as possible.“I think more governments have become more desirous of withholding information — many of them out there have a knee-jerk reaction,” said Kelley Shannon, executive director of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas, which is largely supported by journalism organizations. But lawyers and government spokespeople say they are being flooded with demands for documents, many of which don’t exist or that legally they aren’t allowed to make public.“Requesters are submitting more requests,” said Justin Gordon, the open records chief for the Texas attorney general’s office.  Continue reading...