Open Records Explainers for Southern-Based Organizers!
The Center for Constitutional Rights’ Southern Regional Office and the Open Records Project have created a series of toolkits for activists, advocates, organizers, and community members in Southern states interested in obtaining public records from state government agencies or officials in four states: Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and Louisiana. In recent years, we have seen how open records requests can be extremely useful tools for local and national advocacy, the media, litigation, and organizing campaigns, such as the work the Center for Constitutional Rights continues to do in support of activists in Louisiana. You can find each of the state toolkits, which contain a brief explainer on how to file requests, as well as an annotated sample request, below.
Glossary of Common Open Records Terms
- Administrative Exhaustion: the open records requester has pursued all available remedies of the state agency with which they have filed the open records request before seeking review and relief from a court regarding the agency’s decision on the request. Some states, as well as the federal FOIA, require that you “administratively exhaust”--that is, you go through the back-and-forth exchange with an agency, potentially including appealing any denials you might receive, before suing in court to get records.
- Agency: Any government institution in your state where you are sending your request. This could be a police department, a mayor’s office, a state college, or even an office within a bigger state agency, depending on where you live. Sometimes agencies are referred to as “public bodies” in the law.
- Confidential: intended for or restricted to the use of a particular person, group, or class; private; secret.
- Custodian: A government employee whose records are being searched. Sometimes a custodian can also refer to the person in charge of maintaining the requested records or doing the searches of records of other people, as well. An agency could have multiple custodians - for example, you might want the police chief and lower-level police officers’ records searched at a local police department. Each of those individuals would be a custodian of records.
- Exemption / Exception: A category of public records that are not required to be disclosed because they contain information of a confidential, sensitive, private, or otherwise protected nature. State laws have different “exemptions” (sometimes called “exceptions”) that allow them to redact or deny parts or all of your request. There are many types of these exemptions. Often, state agencies over-use these exemptions or apply them too broadly, and depending on the laws in your state, you can appeal or challenge their use of exemptions.
- Fee waiver: a reduction or elimination of the fees that the requester is required to pay the state agency to produce or copy the requested public records. Because many state agencies and governments charge fees for searching and copying the records you’re asking for, it can be very useful to ask them to “waive” those fees, and request a “fee waiver.” Especially if you’re making your request in the “public interest,” as in the records are to help your community and others get transparency on how a specific government agency works, you can write a few sentences requesting a fee waiver and explaining why you should get the waiver.
- Quasi-public agency: an agency, company, or other entity or body that does work for or on behalf of the government but may also be privately owned or or privately operated in partnership with a government agency.
- Redaction: the striking out of specific information from a pubic record. When any agency produces records to you but there are parts of those records that are blacked out, covered up or blurred, those sections are referred to as being “redacted.” It might look like this: “My name is Joe Smith.” When an agency redacts information, they should also list the reason in the state law supporting that redaction, which is often called an “exemption” or “exception.”
- Requester: The individual or entity submitting an open records request to the agency or officer subject to the state open records act.
The Center for Constitutional Rights thanks organizers Keyanna Michelle Jones and Gabriel Cabán Cubero for their review and comments that were critical to the creation of these resources.