City of San Angelo Plans to Limit Public Information Requests

SAN ANGELO, TX — A curious item on the Tuesday City Council agenda proposes to limit the amount of effort the City Staff consumes responding to requests for public information. Called “Public Information Requests” or PIRs, City staff claims these requests have increased 42 percent since the implementation of special software that allows requesters to submit inquiries through a web portal. Meanwhile, City staff argues, staffing levels at the City Clerk’s office have remained the same.

In order to fix the problem, there is an ordinance change on the agenda that will charge money for voluminous requests. Having to pay money will reduce the requests and workload, staff argues.

“It is expected that most requestors will reduce the volume of their requests rather than pay for all additional information. Therefore, the fiscal impact may be small, but the benefit to staff will be immeasurable,” the council agenda item states.

The change in PIR policy reflects state law that allows municipalities to limit the amount of time City staff spends with each requester. The proposal is to limit time to 15 hours per requester per month and 36 total hours per calendar year and it aligns with state law, the proposal on Tuesday’s agenda reports. After the time limits are exceeded, the requester will receive an estimate “of the total cost, including materials, personnel time, and overhead expenses necessary to comply with the request.”

What is more, the City ordinance change will not allow a requester who has not paid or has not withdrawn a previous request to make a new one.

There are exceptions for news media as defined by the ordinance. Unfortunately, this news platform may not comply with the City’s “news media” definition in the proposed ordinance change as we require no FCC license and do not publish public notices. Yet, this news platform is the dominant news source in the region.

According to City of San Angelo Public Information Officer Brian Groves, “As of Dec. 6, [exactly] 558 PIRs were processed on the city-side of GovQA [the software with the customer portal to request public information], projected at 593 by year-end.

Every 10 years or so, the City of San Angelo goes through a public information debate. Back in 2013, then-City PIO Anthony Wilson wanted to cease sending press releases to a start-up news website called The Christian Reporter-News because Wilson opined it had a “lack of objectivity and [because of] her [the owner’s] status as a blogger.”

“As a practice, we have not sent press releases to bloggers the way that we send it to news media…[because of this,] we stopped sending press releases to that website,” Wilson said back then.

In the end, after a tumultuous City Council meeting, The Christian Reporter-News was added back to the press release email list… at the very top of that list. We reported back then that, “the First Amendment was saved. At least in San Angelo it was.”

This time the debate is similar but a little different. The City has the State Legislature to back it up this time. According to Groves:

“In 2017, House Bill 3107 was adopted to assist cities with managing PIRs. The bill defines a vexatious requestor as anyone who abuses the Public Information Act by sending frequent and/or voluminous requests to a city, disrupting operations of city business.

“The state added this provision, but the City Council must adopt it,” Groves concluded.

Vexatious means "causing or tending to cause annoyance, frustration, or worry," according to Webster. The test will be, will a certain amount of "worry" make the request exceed 15 hours in time to compile?