Want to find out how much money your mayor makes? How about a copy of that building permit for the large structure going up around the corner?

Cities, counties, and states must provide that information under open records laws – whether it’s a journalist or just a curious citizen asking.

But whether you get the information immediately, weeks or months later, or not at all, many times depends on where you live.

When a reporter called the Walton County Sheriff‘s Department in Florida last month for records about a swatting incident at U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s beach house, there was no red tape.

A quick phone call, a follow-up email, and the documents were in hand.

In neighboring Alabama, it’s a different story.

AL.com’s request to the University of Alabama for the name of the group leasing Coleman Coliseum for President Donald Trump’s rally sat unanswered for two weeks. The eventual response that arrived on May 6, five days after the event in the form of a one-line response: “There are no public documents responsive to your open records.”

The sharp contrast between these neighboring states reveals a deeper divide in public records transparency, a divide that leaves Alabama at the bottom of most rankings. It also represents a long-standing clash between one state’s open government ethos and Alabama’s entrenched culture of secrecy.

“Florida and Alabama are famous for their differences,” said Tom Arenberg, journalism instructor at the University of Alabama. “Despite being neighbors, Florida government agencies are among the most responsive in the nation while Alabama’s are among the least.”

There may be hope for improvement in Alabama’s transparency laws. One year after response times were codified into state law, state lawmakers could revisit the issue next spring.

One consideration could include whether response times should be tightened even further and if state law on open records should apply to quasi-governmental agencies like industrial development boards.

“I think we can do better,” said Sen. Arthur Orr, R-Decatur, who sponsored SB270 passed into law last spring that was praised by Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey as the most significant amendment to Alabama’s public records law in over 50 years.

“I find it extremely disturbing that Alabama ranks so poorly,” Orr said. “We rank so poorly when compared to other states which tells me we could certainly do a lot better. It’s extremely important that citizens have access to government records and documents that certainly affect them and their lives.”

Concerning data

If recent research is any indication, there is plenty of room for improvement.

Alabama, according to available analysis on open records compliance, ranks dead last.

According to the non-profit MuckRock, Alabama’s compliance rate – the average number of days it takes for an agency to fulfill an open records request – is 187 days. Only the District of Columbia, where records requests also often include federal agencies, has a longer average wait period.

“The data is disappointing but not surprising,” said Evans Bailey, an attorney with the Alabama Press Association. “Our open records law is pretty outdated even with the current updates. It doesn’t have the features you see in other states encouraging compliance.”

MuckRock, which provides the public assistance in filing government requests through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), dives even deeper into its state-by-state analysis to reveal some poor performances:

• Some state agencies have a poor response record. Alabama Department of Corrections has a 3.23% success rate, according to MuckRock, and it assesses a fee on requesters more than 50% of the time.
• City police agencies have poor success rates. The average response time for a Birmingham police record is over 200 days, with a success rate at 1.7%. In Mobile, the police take an average of 312 days to respond to a request for a success rate of 2.44%.
• Some state agencies do a better job of responding. The Alabama Department of Public Health, on average, takes 30 days to respond and has a success rate of 17.2%. But similar departments in states like Idaho and Nebraska – both Republican-dominated states which are at the top of the compliance rankings – have a higher success rate.
• The University of Alabama averages 59 days for a request, at a success rate of 19.2%. Universities in states that rank much higher than Alabama in compliance include the University of Nebraska at 33%, Indiana University at 38.5%, and the University of Florida at 50%.

Examining the law

David Cuillier, director of Brechner Freedom of Information Project at the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida and whose data research has long focused on open records compliance, said that Alabama has a long way to go to dig itself out from the bottom.

Cuillier compiled over 50,000 requests of all government levels utilizing MuckRock’s data from 2010-2018 and found that Alabama’s compliance rate was 10 percent – lowest in the nation.

Worse yet, he criticizes the 2024 law for making open records access more problematic than it ever has been.

“While it’s great to have a governor who says they will support transparency, the updates didn’t really move the needle for Alabama,” Cuillier said.

The new Alabama law includes some key concerns that he cites:

*The deadlines for a substantive response either fulfilling or denying a records request under SB270 is 15 days. Cuillier said that kind of wait is “extremely long compared to other states.”

Research suggests states with such long deadlines “end up with longer lag times” compared to states that don’t enshrine deadlines into law, Cuillier said.

He said the allowance in SB270 for agencies to extend the deadline in 15-day increment is “one of the worst provisions in the country.”

Of the 39 states with a response time limit, 27 do not allow agencies an extension. Only seven states have a response time longer than the 15 days set in Alabama.

*The law also allows a public employee to require a requester to pay a “reasonable fee” for any public record.

Cuillier said that can lead to abuse. “The state should not charge any copy fees, or at least only for the actual cost of materials,” such as paper and toner, he said.

*Alabama is one of nine states that require individuals requesting public records to be state residents.

Cuillier calls it a “terrible practice” that only a handful of states continue to employ.

*Agencies are still responsible for determining the validity of a request, and can ignore those that are “vague, ambiguous, overly broad and unreasonable in scope.”

“That is extremely broad and will be abused extensively,” Cuillier said. “It’s up to the government to decide what is unreasonable? This is not the right way to deal with vexatious requests.”

Legal fees

Cuillier found in 2019 that the overall strength of a state’s public records law did not correlate to actual compliance. However, he did link one legal provision to compliance in the form of mandatory attorney fee-shifting, where the government as the losing party in a public records lawsuit must pay the attorney’s fees of the plaintiff.

“If there were serious repercussions for non-compliance, then agencies are more likely to take the law seriously,” he said.

Orr said he would be open to the provision.

“I certainly wouldn’t have a problem with it if the government entity is stonewalling and forcing someone wanting records to go to court,” he said. “Then the government should pay if they lose in court.”

Bailey, with the Press Association, said he believes an attorney fee-shifting provision is a “good idea” but that it could be legally tricky.

The Alabama Constitution provides for state immunity from civil lawsuits, and the Alabama State Supreme Court has prevented attorney’s fee from being awarded to plaintiffs in cases that have not involved the Open Meetings Act.

“There may be a way to do it by statute, but you have to do it the right way, if that is the route the Legislature decides to take,” Bailey said.

Cultural issue

Cuillier said that a state’s political culture, and not necessarily partisan makeup, determines the strength of open records compliance and transparency in government.

States that rank atop compliance ratings include those that have had longer Republican trifectas than Alabama. A trifecta is a term in which one political party holds majorities in both chambers of the state legislature and the governor’s office.

Idaho is the No. 1 state for compliance tied with Washington and has had a GOP trifecta in place for 31 years. Alabama’s GOP trifecta has existed for 15 years.

The poorest transparency appears to be regional and focused on the South. Along with Alabama, states ranking in the bottom for open records compliance include Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Georgia.

Florida has also been dropping in the rankings which Cuillier wrote about in a piece published for The Conversation in March.

He attributed the drop to the decline of newspapers, fewer reporters pushing for public records, and fewer editors advocating for transparency.

More than 1,100 exemptions have been passed to Florida’s Sunshine Law, copy fees have increased, and compliance rates have dropped in recent years.

The issue, Cuillier argues, is nationwide as “secrecy creep” spreads through the country and as compliance rates have plummeted in America from about 50 percent a decade ago to about one-third.

The stakes are high, he argued, from the ramifications on democracy to the the societal costs of inefficient government.

Bailey said that the public sometimes has a hard time conceptualizing the benefits of open records beyond a desire from the media.

“It may not benefit them personally, but it may benefit society in the form of a smooth and ethical way of running things as a whole,” Bailey said.

Orr said he’s committed to making additional changes, encouraging compliance and dislodging Alabama from the bottom of the rankings.

He said he is concerned with mischief in the process, where individuals make unreasonable record requests that “just create problems for government entities” and can become problematic for local governments if a large number of requests are made.

Beyond that, he said, “we want something that is reasonable but tight and increases the accountability in government. I’m committed to continuing the process.”