sarah
A recent article in The Bridge highlights that this one resident’s public records requests required hundreds of hours of staff time at Montpelier City Hall. The story frames those requests primarily as a burden on government operations.
What the article does not explore is the obvious follow-up question: Why does one citizen need to file so many records requests in the first place?
Public records laws exist because government does not always volunteer information, even when decisions involve millions of public dollars; statutory planning requirements; procurement rules; or policies affecting housing, infrastructure, and vulnerable populations. When normal transparency mechanisms fail, citizens are left with one tool: formal requests for records.
In other words, public records requests are not the disease. They are the thermometer.
The article reports that Montpelier received 220 records requests in 2025, with about 71% coming from one requester, and that fulfilling them required significant staff time and legal costs.
But this framing misses the point. If key planning, contract procurement, or infrastructure decisions are clear, well-documented, and proactively shared, citizens won’t need to spend months digging through records. Transparency reduces requests. Opaqueness increases them.
Records requests are often the only way to determine:
- Whether statutory planning processes were followed, for example with Country Club Road.
- Whether municipal procurement laws were respected.
- Whether consultants or developers were given improper influence and failed to disclose conflicts.
- Whether decisions affecting housing and infrastructure were made without required public engagement.
No citizen files dozens of requests for fun. They do so because something doesn’t add up and documentation is required to get the attention of the press or city councilors.
It is also worth noting what the article itself acknowledges: public records access is central to journalism and government accountability. Limiting access because requests are inconvenient would punish the public, not solve governance problems.
If the goal is to reduce the burden on the staff, the solution is not to weaken transparency laws. The solution is better governance, clearer processes, proactive disclosure, and decisions made openly so residents do not need to reverse-engineer what happened after the fact.
And perhaps the situation can be summed up with a Vermont anecdote.
A Texas cattle farmer visiting Vermont once boasted that his ranch was so large he could drive from the crack of dawn till sundown and still not reach the end of it.
The Vermonter listened carefully and then replied calmly, “Yep. I had a truck like that once.”
Sometimes the problem isn’t the distance. It’s the vehicle.
Right now, the problem isn’t public records requests. It’s the governance machinery that makes them necessary.
Stephen Whitaker is Montpelier’s leading public records requestor, hands down.
The material presented here represents the opinion of the author and does not reflect the opinions of The Bridge. Commentaries may be submitted to editor@montpelierbridge.com. Preference is given to submissions by those who live in central Vermont. Submissions are encouraged to be 500 to 750 words in length.
