Georgia law for the past few years has specifically said that government agencies must accept records requests via email or fax, “provided such agency uses email or facsimile in the normal course of its business.”
But trying to communicate electronically with 159 counties proved a tremendous challenge, even in the Internet-driven world of 2024, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution public records audit of county governments found.
In recognition of National Sunshine Week and National Freedom of Information Day – March 16, birthday of Bill of Rights author and president James Madison – reporters with the AJC sought to reach out to every county in Georgia to see how well they would respond when sent an open records request.
Specifically, the Journal-Constitution asked each county to provide copies of the county’s most recent approved county commission minutes. The newspaper made all 159 requests electronically to see how the counties would fare with electronic requests only.
The AJC’s results suggest that if the state legislature intended for the average citizen to be able to request a public record from their community officials via email, that plan isn’t totally working. As of this writing, the newspaper had yet to get a response to its messages sent to 24 counties, or about one county in every seven.
Many counties’ websites turned out not to identify a county records custodian or specify to whom, or what email address, a records request should be sent.
In those cases, the AJC sought to do what many average citizens would do: Turn to Google to try to find an email address for a county manager, county clerk or county commission chairman.
An online directory of email addresses published by the state county clerk’s association proved helpful – but even then, some of the email addresses yielded only error messages about nonworking accounts.
Sometimes, the reporters’ guesswork yielded a friendly message back from a county official in one of the the Peach State’s furthest corners.
Other messages apparently vanished into the Internet ether and were never responded-to.
“With routine requests such as minutes of meetings, every local government should have responded positively,” David E. Hudson, an Augusta lawyer whose practice includes media law, said by email. “For those that did not, there may have been some reason that the local government did not receive the request, or it was routed to someone in the local government who did not receive it or who made an error in submitting the materials.”
Each emailed request was given the subject line of “Open Records Act request from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution,” and the body text reused the same wording.
There was one set of counties that were an exception: Those that had online records request portals. If a given county had a portal easily findable on its website or through Google, the request was sent via the portal.
A total of twenty-four counties, or about 15% of the total, offered an online portal or web form for easy request-filing. Counties with online records portals tended to be among the state’s largest. Still, four counties with portals did not respond to the AJC’s request.
In the end, four out of every five of Georgia’s counties responded to the newspaper positively and fulfilled the request, the AJC’s analysis found.
Eighty-two counties sent electronic copies of the minutes. Another 47 counties provided a link to a county website that stored copies of the minutes.
Some provided not only the legally requested documents but excellent customer service.
Take Sharon Sanders, the county manager in Crawford County, just west of Macon – the county seat is tiny Roberta, Ga., population 1,000. She took just 20 minutes to respond to the newspaper’s request. She also picked up the phone and called to make sure the newspaper got what it was looking for.
Under average circumstances, Crawford County might get only a couple of people a month making records requests, Sanders said. But a proposed development of a nearby rock quarry and the 2024 political season means a lot more requests coming in.
“Normally, before all of this took place, it was not many,” Sanders, who has worked in county government 17 years, said of the flow of requests. “But with all this going on, it’s been quite a few.”
An hour’s drive northwest of Savannah, the county seat of Candler County claims the slogan of “everything’s better in Metter.” Their response to the AJC’s public records request was pretty good, too: It also took only 20 minutes for the Candler County clerk to respond to the newspaper with links to the requested commission minutes. That’s even though state law says agencies have three business days to respond to a records request.
Meanwhile, down in Cordele in southwest Georgia, the self-proclaimed Watermelon Capital of the World, Crisp County was the only county to officially “deny” the AJC’s request.
The county’s finance director responded promptly to the AJC’s request within 90 minutes. The director said that the minutes were available on the county’s website, and included a link, adding that a formal response would be forthcoming.
Several days later, a formal response letter arrived at the newspaper’s offices via U.S. Mail, saying the request had been denied because “the information you have requested is readily available on our website www.crispcounty.com.”
Jennifer Peebles is a data specialist on the AJC’s investigative team and handles hundreds of public records requests each year for the newspaper. She would like to hear readers’ stories about their experiences accessing public records and she welcomes story tips. Contact her at jennifer.peebles@ajc.com.
