Sunshine Week: Writing The Perfect Public Information Request

Now that you’ve learned a little about what’s avaliable through the Texas Public Information Act, let’s talk a little about how to ask for what you want and whom you should ask.

First, let’s start with the “whom you should ask” part. First off, if the city, county, or other government agency you are seeking information from has a Public Information Officer, that’s the place to start. If not, call them up and ask. Or, in the alternative, address the letter to the head elected or appointed official in charge of a particular department or area: A county judge, a city manager, an executive director, etc.

Before you sit down to writing a letter, make a list of what you would like to obtain or view. Then, refine that list until each document or class of document is a separate request and is as specific as possible without making it so narrow that no documents (or documents you don’t know exist but have the information you need) are responsive to your actual request.

As for writing the letter, there is no required statutory language the thing has to have in it. But, I always include it just the same to make sure people know they’ve got their hands on a document they have to respond to as quickly as possible.

The best way of showing you how I write these things to give you a model to follow is by providing you a sample, which I’ve done here (in .doc format, email me for another format).

Note that this particular letter was directed to a law enforcement agency and was one seeking information on a specific officer (all of the specifics about that department and that officer have been redacted). You can use a similar format when requesting information on a public employee. Or, if you want documents about a specific action of an agency, you can modify it as needed. I picked this particular ORR at random from among my files, as it is the format I commonly use.

You will also notice several paragraphs under the actual request are some “boilerplate” stuff I commonly include. Back in 2001, I started including the stuff about “custody” in my open records request because I found—in the case of counties and cities involved in litigation—the government bodies themselves don’t always have the documents in their possession. And, they don’t always know that, just because the documents are in the possession of someone they’ve hired to do their work, that they are still public records under the control of the government agency. So, you might want to leave that in just in case (some larger government bodies may, in fact, hire outside companies to catalog or store some of their records).

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