Legislative committee hears municipal push to ease record-request burdens, considers 'vexatious requester' remedy

Municipal officials and a national policy expert told a legislative committee on Jan. 8 that Vermont towns are struggling to comply with modern public-records requests and urged targeted statutory fixes to reduce legal costs and staff burdens while preserving public access.

Samantha Sheehan, municipal policy and advocacy specialist for the Vermont League of Cities and Towns, told the committee the League’s members regularly face voluminous requests that require attorney review and lengthy redaction. "Currently, there's 3 business days to respond to initial request. We recommend moving that to 14," Sheehan said, arguing a longer initial-response window would reflect current workloads and electronic records practices.

Sheehan told lawmakers that towns without in-house counsel often hire outside attorneys to review records for allowable redactions — including deliberative material and personnel information — and that those expenses can be substantial. "Some members had already exceeded a $100,000," she said of local expenditures in a single budget cycle.

The League proposed several changes intended to reduce litigation risk and administrative strain without narrowing who may request records or what records are public. Those recommendations include clarifying that a nonresponse should not automatically be treated as a denial, establishing a clear municipal-level appeals path for towns that lack an agency head, and allowing municipalities to require deposits or fees for large, costly requests so costs are not left on local taxpayers.

Sheehan also described a model used in Maine that would allow a municipality to seek a court determination that repeated or overly broad requests are "vexatious." If a judge agrees, the town could be relieved of the obligation to respond to those specific requests, she said, calling it an optional remedy to break an "infinity loop" of repetitive requests that can exhaust small offices.

Will Clark of the National Conference of State Legislatures gave a national overview of approaches states use to balance access and administrative burden. "Every single state has a public records law," Clark said, and laws vary widely on exemptions, timelines, fees and enforcement. He pointed to examples across the spectrum: Idaho caps fees at actual copying costs, Michigan generally bars charging for search and review except in limited circumstances, and North Carolina allows special service charges for extensive IT or clerical work.

Clark reviewed court decisions that have shaped practice: for example, California courts have limited charging requesters for employee time spent editing videos for redaction, while other decisions have required agencies to show supervision or other justification before imposing inspection fees. Clark also noted that roughly a dozen states have open-records ombudsmen to mediate disputes before litigation.

Throughout a committee Q&A, legislators pressed for details about business-day calculations, what happens if a custodian never issues a denial, whether requesters may photograph records, and whether statutes can scale to reflect the different capacity of a town of 4,000 versus a large city. Clark and Sheehan acknowledged tradeoffs and offered to follow up with statutory citations and examples.

The committee did not take any formal votes. Members said they would continue work on the subject in coming weeks; a subsequent witness, Representative Bliss, was scheduled to testify next.

(Reporting based on committee proceedings; the committee name was not stated in the transcript.)