The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

The bills, sponsored by Rep. Terry Nealey, are aimed at preventing records request abuses

OLYMPIA – Washington State Representative Terry Nealey (R-Dayton) recently had two bills he helped draft signed into law by Governor Jay Inslee.

The bills are the product of years of effort by Nealey to help address the issue of excessive public records requests that are meant to set local governments up for potential legal actions. A State Auditor’s report in 2016 said that local agencies received over 280,000 requests in the last few years.

Nealey was the co-sponsor of House Bill 1594, which was primarily sponsored by Rep. Joan McBride (D-Kirkland). The bill created a grant program to help fund training for smaller agencies to better manage their records, according to a press release. The bill also allows the State Attorney General’s office to help local agencies and governments respond to requests, and also funds a study to help create an online means to access public records.

Citizens were given more access to public records in Washington in 1972, after a bill was passed by the legislature that allowed citizens to request public records documents at a price of 15 cents per page.

However, with the rise of electronic storage of documents, many people now request free electronic copies, which allows the requestors to ask for massive amounts of information, according to Nealey, via email. He went on to say that this ties up a lot of resources and can cost agencies a lot of money, which is paid by taxpayers.

Nealey said that bills have been proposed many times in recent years to correct the issues with public records requests. One bill that was proposed in last year’s session created controversy, as it was met with pushback from the Newspaper Alliance and the Washington Coalition for Open Government. He also sponsored House Bill 1595, which allows agencies to charge a small fee for copies of electronic public records.

The package of bills took five months of this year’s session to pass, taking from the opening day in January until May. The bills were a bipartisan effort in the state legislature. Both house Democrats and Republicans voted heavily for it, with the final vote resulting in 80 ‘yeas’ to 18 ‘nays.’

The bills also provide protections against requests that are believed to be vexatious in nature. Some reasons behind people making excessive requests include trying to disrupt the functions of the affected government agencies, as well as opening them up to lawsuits if they don’t or cannot respond in a timely manner. This has happened in many small towns across the state, including in Starbuck in 2015.

The Starbuck case arose from a request for all invoices for all legal services used by the City of Starbuck from Dec. 2013 to the date of the request, as reported by The Times. Starbuck was sued for tens of thousands of dollars in the case, which could have bankrupted the city.

Nealey said that this was just one case of a small city in Washington getting sued due to these public records requests, as it also happened in places like Prosser, Rosalia and Palouse.