Committee moves transparency updates forward
RIVERTON — “The deck is clearly stacked against the public,” News Letter Journal Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Bob Bonnar told the Wyoming State Legislature’s Joint Elections, Corporations, and Political Subdivisions Committee Friday afternoon.
After the November election, Bonnar and the News Letter Journal uncovered troubling anomalies in Weston County’s election results. More than 100 days ago, that paper put in a request for Weston County public records pertaining to prior elections, attempting to determine whether the inaccuracies in the most recent election were part of a pattern.
State law requires that public records requests be fulfilled within 30 days.
So far, Weston County has declined to produce all of the requested records.
Despite serious concerns regarding the integrity of Weston County’s elections, direction from Wyoming Public Records Ombudsman Darlena Potter to release the records, and Wyoming state statute, Bonnar is still waiting.
As of Friday morning, Weston County had yet to hand over records that, by all rights and all legal definitions, should be public.
Last week, the committee had its first interim meeting of 2025, held in Lander as has become traditional.
Public records and open meetings laws were just one item on a stacked agenda – but they were an item that drew passionate professional testimony from journalists, the state ombudsman, and other lawmakers as well as from members of the public.
While there were variations in statements and requests, the overall message to the committee – and by extension, the legislature – was clear: Wyoming needs greater transparency, and it needs transparency laws that “have teeth.”
“What we’ve created is an environment where backroom deals and shady use of taxpayer funds becomes easy, and oversight becomes hard – and expensive,” Ranger and Lander Journal Managing Editor Sarah Squires commented in a later interview.
“If it is the law that people have the right for freedom of information,” commented State Representative Pepper Ottman, then there should be no excuses for not following that law.
Ottman is not on the Elections, Corporations, and Political Subdivisions Committee this interim; she is simply committed to government transparency, and she attended the meeting in order to testify in favor of more robust transparency laws.
Before the committee’s meeting, Bonnar sent the committee members an email that contained a package 50-plus pages long.
The first few pages contained his personal experiences and history working on issues of transparency in the state of Wyoming, including working closely with the committee on its past two rounds of addressing transparency laws over the past 15 years.
The remaining 50 pages, he told the committee, are newspaper articles from the past year that discovered and laid out the evidence of local governments breaking government transparency laws.
That compilation was by no means exhaustive, he added; there were many more incidents of governments breaking and skirting the law in the past 12 months.
“It’s become a game with local governments to see what you can get away with,” Bonnar told the committee.
While industry professionals like Bonnar and lawmakers serving on the committee were important in bringing the topic forward this year, members of the public also played a key role.
Jackson resident and retired attorney Sandy Ress, for instance, recently took a local hospital board to court for open meetings law violations.
The courts found against him before the case was eventually settled, but the incident highlighted for Ress that the state’s transparency laws have significant loopholes.
He’s been reaching out to legislators since; Rep. Mike Yin, D-Jackson, who read a statement from Ress at the meeting, remarked that Ress is likely one of the reasons this item is on the committee’s agenda at all.
Ombudsman
Potter’s position was created the last time the legislature updated the state’s transparency laws, in 2019.
In theory, Wyoming law requires governments to respond to requests for public records – and to provide public records when requested. Her position is intended to help mediate in the case of disputes between requester and requestee, deciding whether fees are unreasonably high or a request is taking too long before the case ends up in court.
In practice, Potter told the committee, the term “reasonable fee” lacks legal definition, and her position lacks authority.
Some government officials simply say that they don’t intend to respond to records requests and don’t care about statute.
Law enforcement, meanwhile, she said, often seems to “perceive me like the IRS”; a layer of bureaucracy rather than someone who, like them, is working to uphold the law for the benefit of the public.
“If you don’t perceive that we’ve given you that power [to report someone breaking the law], then that’s something we as a committee may need to consider,” Sen. Bill Landen, R-Casper, told Potter.
“Right now, the entire burden is on the public,” Bonnar pointed out. “The one thing governments have lost track of … is that producing public records is their job.”
Wyoming law puts a price tag on government misconduct: up to a $750 civil penalty, typically for the individual(s) who violated the law.
That fine is very rarely applied; Bonnar said that he can’t think of a single instance of personally having seen it actually paid.
And, in order for the fine to even be considered, someone has to take the violating government body to civil court, often paying more in attorney fees than the fine is worth.
His recent lawsuit, hinging on that $750 fee for Weston County commissioners who violated open meetings laws in selecting a state legislator to fill a vacant seat, cost him $15,000, he said.
Bonnar currently works for a Colorado school district, he explained.
There, the fines for violating public records and open meetings laws are in the thousands, not hundreds, of dollars – and those laws are taken far more seriously by local governments than Wyoming’s are.
Bonnar echoed Potter’s statement: In order to be effective, laws need to “have teeth.”
“Truly once you experience kind of the lawlessness,” Cheyenne resident Victor Miller told the committee, “what you have is kind of a law-and-order question.”
Since the start of the year, Potter told the committee, she’s handled 27 cases. Only six remain in progress; one of those cases is Bonnar’s.
Fixing transparency
“Accountability is meaningless when it’s unaffordable,” Squires pointed out. “When records fees can be arbitrarily applied and weaponized to act as a deterrent, it cuts off the folks who are willing to spend time being the government watchdogs – that in some places in Wyoming, are sorely needed.”
One of the topics the committee is examining in particular is how local governments may charge for records.
Currently, what’s considered a “reasonable” fee is not defined in statute, and an audit conducted last year by The Ranger and Lander Journal showed huge disparities in the way governments tally those bills, with some relatively straightforward records requests netting bills in the thousands of dollars.
Bonnar laid out the transparency remedies he would propose: Give the ombudsman more authority, reduce the timeline governments have to comply with records requests, require elected officials associations to comply with public records and open meetings laws, and increase the upper limit of a fine for breaking these laws while empowering the ombudsman to levy that fine.
He also said there should be a reversal on fees, so governments have to go to the ombudsman in order to charge fees for public records rather than members of the public having to go to her if they feel fees are too burdensome.
Years ago, he conceded that there are times when governments may accidentally skirt the law out of ignorance and that there are cases when fees make sense, he told the committee – and he’s come to regret that concession.
This time around, Bonnar said, he intends to stand firm: Public data should be freely available to the public. And, he pointed out, if someone’s pulled over for speeding they don’t get out of a ticket just because they missed the speed limit sign; how is it fair to hold members of the public to a different standard than local governments?
However, Cheyenne Mayor Patrick Collins described an egregious data mining situation his office faces.
Every month, hours and hours worth of requests come pouring in from out-of-state corporations looking to make a buck turning around and selling that information back to Wyomingites. It doesn’t serve his constituents well to ask his staff to freely give their time to those requests instead of fulfilling their other functions, he said.
Landen and Committee Chairman Sen. Cale Case, R-Lander, agreed: There are times when requests are excessive, and having a fee schedule in place can help rein in those requests.
It was largely agreed that the State of Wyoming’s Department Administration and Information’s fee schedule is fair and reasonable, and legislators proposed a standardized fee schedule for local governments based on that one.
The idea was also raised that records requested in the pursuit of the public good should be provided free of charge.
In cases of disputes, the ombudsman would be empowered to rule whether a fee should be waived – or if a request was so excessive it justified additional fees or taking extra time to fulfill.
The committee also decided to weigh whether governments should be responsible for attorney fees in civil cases in which the courts find they’ve violated transparency laws.
The majority of the legislators agreed the issue was worth continuing to explore, and Case outlined a potential bill for the Legislative Service Office to put together, containing most of Bonnar’s points but some kind of standardized fee schedule rather than no fees.
It was decided to consider both Bonnar’s suggestion of election official associations records and the issue of open meetings laws separately.
Case, Miller, Collins and others also remarked that a simple way for governments to avoid burdensome data requests is to simply make public records available online, removing the need for a staff member to fulfill those requests.
The committee’s next meeting will be in Casper on August 14 and 15, and the draft public records legislation LSO produces as a result of Friday’s conversations will likely be unveiled and discussed at that meeting.
This story was published on May 14, 2025.