Government officials complained about what they described as burdensome public records requests during a Wednesday meeting of Nevada’s Public Records Task Force.
The task force was created by the Nevada Legislature to recommend improvements to the Nevada Public Records Act. The task force is made up of both government staff and transparency advocates.
The Wednesday meeting highlighted divisions between those two factions: government employees wanting restrictions that would make their agencies’ work easier — like forcing people to pay staffing costs or disclose the purpose of their request — and transparency advocates seeking to broaden access to records.
The disagreements set the stage for a policy conflict at the 2027 legislative session that could impact taxpayer and media access to public records that hold government accountable.
Las Vegas Review-Journal Chief Legal Officer Benjamin Lipman, a task force member, emphasized that the committee should “not let exceptions dictate what the rule is.”
“It should be noted that taxpayers already pay for the staff and have already paid for the creation of the records and maintenance of the records and they are the public’s records,” he said.
Some of the examples cited by government staff were extreme, including someone who requested every Metropolitan Police Department event number over the agency’s entire 53-year existence and a person whose requests to the state required review of about 201,000 documents.
Heather Hahn, records manager for the Nevada Department of Transportation, was one of several officials who gave a presentation to the committee.
“Broad public records requests significantly hamper an agency’s ability to respond in a timely manner to all records requests,” she said, adding that her department had seen a 33 percent increase in records requests between 2023 and 2025.
She said her agency has not received additional resources or staff to handle the increased volume. Broad and “vexatious” requests worsen the strain, she told the task force.
One requester who refused to narrow requests was responsible for about 2 percent of all records requests in a two-year period, according to Hahn. Those requests required staff to review about 200,700 documents, she said.
“The work associated with the 34 requests would require an estimated 8,028 staff hours to complete” and a cost of at least $152,500 in personnel time, Hahn said.
Matthew Christian, an attorney for the Metropolitan Police Department who serves on the task force, said Hahn’s comments were insightful. In the case of the person who wanted every event number, he said Metro reached out to the requester, who agreed to narrow the request.
In the “FOIA bombing category,” Christian described a man angered by the release of his mug shot who has filed AI-generated requests and sued Metro despite the department’s efforts to provide him with information.
“The volume has gone up over the years, for sure,” he said, later adding that he understood that detectives working on body-worn camera requests had fallen several months behind.
Brittany Walker, city attorney for Boulder City, also complained about the strain of records requests.
“We’re not allocated funding for responding to public records requests; and we have, as local governments, other obligations in state law and in our functions as agencies that we have to dedicate staff to,” she said.
Walker went on to suggest forcing requesters to disclose the purpose of their requests, “cooperate” with the governmental agency filling the request and use a specific form.
Christian suggested clarifying Nevada law to require a requester to pay staffing costs if a request is deemed overbroad and will consume a large amount of staff time, leading to a loss of services for taxpayers or the need to hire additional employees.
Lipman pushed back.
The issue was more one of budgeting, he said, arguing that if agencies need extra money to fill records requests, the budgeting process should address that need instead of “foisting those costs off on public records requesters.”
Contact Noble Brigham at nbrigham@reviewjournal.com.
