Editorial: Welcome guidance on speeding public records duty

Published 1:30 am Thursday, November 13, 2025

By The Herald Editorial Board

Things may soon look a bit sunnier, a little more quickly.

Regardless of the weather, an effort by the state Attorney General’s Office promises to shine more sunlight more quickly on the public records generated and held by state and local governments.

Washington Attorney General Nick Brown is proposing a clarification of rules for the state’s Public Records Act that are intended to provide guidance on the handling of those records to provide more timely release of the records requested by the public and media.

The state Public Records Act, made law by citizen initiative in 1972, requires release of public records at all levels of government related to the work performed on the public’s behalf. The law’s reasoning holds that in delegating the people’s authority to its representatives, the people have not forfeited the right for transparency of government. That transparency is necessary to ensure government is operating as expected for the public’s benefit.

State agencies and local governments — from state departments, agencies and officials, to local governments, down to the smallest of districts — are required to be responsive to requests from the public and the media for documents, records and information that are created in the course of their work.

And it’s not just the media, but members of the public, attorneys, organizations, insurers and even other governments that have made increasing use of the law, reported Washington State Standard’s Jake Goldstein-Street earlier this week. A report by a legislative committee that surveyed 230 public agencies in the state, less than a tenth of the 2,400 state and local government agencies charged with responding to the law. In total, they received more than 438,000 requests for public records in 2023, up from 383,000 in 2019.

With that increase in demand for records, many of those agencies have allowed the notion of the “prompt” and “timely” response expected in the state law to slip. The state audit found that response times for forwarding records to requesters had increased in 2023 to an average of nearly 25 days, up from 15 days in 2019. Even as about 55 percent of requests were fulfilled within five days, some requests took months to years to be fulfilled.

Among the proposed rules for new guidance to governments, the rule changes advise agencies to — rather than treating all requests on a first-come, first-served basis — create two tracks for requests: those that can be fulfilled quickly, such as a request for an easily identified and retrieved single document, and more complex, harder-to-find and less defined requests that require more staff time to assemble and can generate hundreds to thousands of pages of documents. The expectation is that requests for the first track can be completed within five business days. Currently, those more easily completed requests can wait in line behind requests that demand more time to complete.

Another change that could speed up compliance would raise the threshold for when agencies would need to notify third parties named in public records. Currently, those listed in a public document must be notified and given an opportunity to seek a court order to prevent the record’s release if that information “may affect rights of others and may be exempt from disclosure,” which can further delay if not prevent release of records.

The rule change would require notification only if release of the information could “substantially and irreparably damage” a person or vital government function. Further, agencies would have to believe that the documents were arguably exempt from release before providing third-party notice.

And importantly, the rules would bar the automatic deletion of records, common with text messages, requiring that decisions on deletion of records be made by records management staff.

Not that some governments aren’t pushing back against the rule changes. During a recent hearing on the new rules, representatives for local governments, including the Association for Washington Cities, said the direction to set requests on separate tracks would demand more staff time, and called the guidance itself subjective and ill-defined.

But it’s just as reasonable to see governments’ current understanding of the rules as subjective and poorly defined, as alleged in a request made in 2024 to the attorney general’s office by a coalition of media outlets that included The Seattle Times, the Associated Press, The New York Times and Allied Daily Newspapers of Washington.

“Reporters have been receiving outrageously long time estimates for satisfying simple records requests,” the petition to the attorney general reads. “Some of the largest agencies are allowing extreme backlogs to interfere with the public’s right to be informed in a timely manner of pressing concerns. Although the Public Records Act clearly requires disclosure to be ‘prompt’ and as helpful to requesters as possible, the reality falls far short of that standard.”

Local governments and smaller districts, in particular, deserve some recognition for the staff time and expense that responding to pubic records requests require. As an example, an online dashboard operated by the state’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Committee, which compiled the public records response audit, allows the public to review an agency’s response to records requests. Referring to that dashboard, the City of Everett, for example, spent an average of 1.3 hours responding to each request it received at a total cost to the city of $1.1 million in 2023. Of that, it recovered about $1,000 in expenses from requesters for copying fees and related services.

Yet those costs and the demand on staff time may argue for the guidance the attorney general is suggesting as a way to address both.

Even as past disputes still demand resolution, such as individual state lawmakers’ lack of compliance with public records requests, more such guidance will yet be required.

Advances in how information and data are gathered. retained and released are creating new wrinkles for records transparency, such as the innovation of Flock Safety cameras used to track motor vehicles and identify their registered owners, as a recent investigation by The Herald and a court case in Skagit County have shown.

State legislators, the attorney general and the state’s Sunshine Committee should continue to give their full attention to these issues.

For now, some legal guidance from the state’s largest law firm should help direct state and local agencies’ compliance with a basic requirement of good government.