PHOENIX - Public agencies can't block people from seeking records just because they've requested lots of them in the past, the Arizona Court of Appeals ruled Thursday.
The judges rejected the legal bid by the Congress School District in Yavapai County to bar four individuals from filing what school officials called "vexatious" public-records requests without first getting court approval. Attorneys for the district said the requests diverted the staff from teaching or other duties, amounting to a public nuisance.
But Judge Sheldon Weisberg, writing for the unanimous court, said there was no evidence the number of requests was unreasonable. And he noted all the documents sought were, in fact, public records.
"Public-records requests are intended to inform the public about how a government is performing its duties," Weisberg wrote. "It would defy the purpose of our public-records law to deny the public rightful access to information on how the district is conducting its functions on the tenuous ground that requesting such lawful access constituted public nuisance."
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According to court records, there had been intermittent requests from the four people at issue until the 2008-09 school year when one filed 23 requests and four complaints with the state Ombudsman's Office, whose duties include reviewing complaints of lack of public access. Another filed 22 requests and a third had 10.
The following year there were a combined 13 requests.
Last year the district sued to block future requests, arguing not that the requests were not legitimate but that, in the aggregate, the prior requests constituted public nuisance, harassment and an abuse of the public-records law.
Weisberg said the requests may be a burden. But it's a burden shared by all custodians of public records, and denying access made no sense when school officials could not cite a single case where anything sought was not a public record.
The judge said there have been cases where courts have enjoined public-records requests that were overly broad and efforts to acquire a burdensome array of random information. But Weisberg said, is not the case here.
He said if future requests do, in fact, become overly broad or outside the scope of the law, the school district is free to go to court to bar them. But pre-emptive action is inappropriate, Weisberg said.
Besides denying the district's request, the court ordered the district to pay the legal fees for the plaintiffs in the case.
