Carla Occaso
The Montpelier City Council addressed a surge in public records requests, Country Club Road funding, and the Barre Street water breaks during its Feb. 11 meeting.
Public Records Requests
Acting Assistant City Manager Evelyn Prim presented a slide show depicting the public records requests from 2025. This, she said, caused staff members to spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars to procure the records, answer questions, redact sensitive information, and route the records to the requestor.
Vermont’s open records law (1 V.S.A. §§ 315–320) says “any person has the right to request inspection or copying of a public record from government agencies,” and those records must be produced within three business days after the government agency receives the request.
The city of Montpelier received 220 total requests in 2025, most seeking information from either the city manager’s office or the planning director’s office. This amount of requests took about 634 staff hours, she said. About 71% of the requests (156) came from one person, she said, who Prim later named as Stephen Whitaker in an email to The Bridge. Legal fees alone were $6,103.50 in 2025. This year, from Jan. 1 through Feb. 11, the office has received 39 public records requests, with 33 of them coming from Whitaker.
Counselor Adrienne Gil said she does not want her taxpayer money going towards public records requests, and that if the general public knew so much time and money was being spent this way, “they would be outraged.”
Councilor Cary Brown said she works for the state, and they have a single person with a job dedicated to handling all public records requests. She said that it may become necessary to create a position that only handles public records requests so the rest of the staff members can do their assigned jobs. She suggested pressuring the Legislature to change the public records request law to alleviate pressure on the city staff.
No action was taken.
The 2026 state Legislature is considering amendments to the existing public records law. The bill, H.22, “an act relating to access to information concerning benefit extension agreements for employees of public agencies,” seeks to amend the existing public records laws under Title 32, V.S.A. 317 pertaining to exemptions, and V.S.A. 319 pertaining to enforcement.
The first part seeks to amend the law to remove severance pay and benefits extensions from the “exempt” category (which keeps that information secret) and instead make it available for public inspection. In other words, severance pay and benefits extension information is currently shielded from the public eye along with such information as disciplinary records and medical records. If the bill becomes law, that information would be available for anyone to see.
The second part, pertaining to enforcement, seeks to penalize government entities that have “not acted in good faith by improperly withholding or unduly delaying access to a public record” and comes with a $2,500 fine.
Another proposed bill, Act 520, seeks to authorize public agencies to “charge and collect the actual cost of staff time associated with complying with a request to inspect a public record.”
And finally, Act S.114 is an act relating to allowing entities to charge the actual cost of producing a public record. The act as introduced says that a state agency may retain the money collected under this section of the statute to the extent that the charges represent the actual cost incurred to provide copies or staff time spent complying with the request.
Some of the above two proposed acts originated from the Vermont League of Cities and Towns, in large part because of the volume of requests made by individuals such as Whitaker. However, timely public records requests are an integral part of journalists being able to do their jobs, and of government transparency. Because of that, the recently formed Vermont Journalism Coalition (of which the editor of The Bridge is a board member) has filed testimony opposing VLCT’s proposed revisions to the law.
Country Club Road Development
Planning Director Mike Miller asked the council to amend the contract with the engineering firm Vanasse Hangen Brustlin, Inc. to add $26,000 to include having it write a $5 million federal BUILD grant to pay for part of the Country Club Road development. City staff members would not have the time or expertise to do this, Miller said. Also, the firm has a staff member experienced in writing grants. BUILD grants are issued through the federal U.S. Department of Transportation. The deadline for the BUILD grant application is Feb. 24.
Meanwhile, Miller said the city is also pursuing $5 million from the Community Development Block Grant — Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) with the state Community Development program to fund infrastructure for the Country Club Road property. Additionally, the city needs $3 million to fund a sewer pump station.
Councilor Jim Sheridan expressed dismay that he had not heard of this idea yet, and that Miller should have told everyone about it sooner.
Councilors voted unanimously in favor of authorizing the amendment. Shortly afterward, councilors also voted in favor of paying about $4,800 for a fiscal analyst requested by the Country Club Road Subcommittee. The analysis would be conducted by Burlington-based Crane Associates, Inc. The purpose, according to meeting documents, is to look at the submitted development proposals to determine the financial feasibility relative to projected construction costs and investment capacity.
