Public records have a way of becoming not so public when you ask to see them.

Suzannah Alexander, who has been managing a large public-records project for the National Association of Scholars, recently pointed me to the Colorado State University System’s (CSU) open-records policy.

Under the policy, requests generally must be submitted by mail or fax. Email requests are not accepted unless the records custodian has specifically approved email as a method of submission.

CSU says the rule is in place “due to spam filters and inactive or incorrect e-mail accounts.” (emphasis original)

Perhaps this is the intention for the rule, but I am nevertheless picking my jaw up off the floor. In 2026, someone must mail or fax a request for electronic records?

If the goal is public access, there is little reason a request can’t be accepted by email.

But Suzannah is facing just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the barriers public institutions put in the way of accessing public records. Their favorite tool seems to be the fee.

In 2022, when I was an editor at Campus Reform, I submitted a public-records request to the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth for seven months of emails between two university employees. The university initially estimated that fulfilling the request would take 14,300 hours and cost $357,400.

An analysis that I and other members of the Campus Reform staff conducted at the time found that the fee was enough to cover college expenses for several students and was more than five times the average Massachusetts resident’s annual salary.

Moreover:

Ken Tashjy, [then] a Campus Reform Higher Education Fellow and lawyer familiar with Massachusetts public record law, calculated that if ‘UMASS searched and compiled records for 8 hours a day, it would take 1,787.50 days to reach 14,300 hours, or 4.89 years.’

Tashjy called the fee ‘laughable and absurd!’

I did not need further confirmation that the university’s estimate was absurd, but I got it the following year, when I interviewed Chris Mallow, a “cyber security veteran” who had spent some years at the University of Oklahoma, where part of his job involved conducting email searches for public-records requests.

Mallow told me that narrowly tailored searches were generally not “big deals.” Given a reasonable date range, a handful of people, and specific keywords, he said, “that’s gravy. That’s stuff that we can turn around pretty quickly.”

Once the technical search was complete, Mallow explained, the records went to the office responsible for reviewing, redacting, and ultimately releasing them. He was particularly skeptical of institutions blaming technology for exorbitant costs or delays: “I’d be skeptical of anyone that’s trying to tell you that it’s going to take hundreds of 1000s of dollars to fulfill the request.”

Still, there are folks out there who will grant grace and charity to institutions that say, we’re doing everything we can.

I am not one of those people. I am a doubt collector. I believe the obstacles are there for a reason.

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