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During its March 3 meeting, the Manchester Board of Mayor and Aldermen voted to move forward in the process of filing an injunctive relief lawsuit against a member of the public related to the volume of records requests made to the city.

An executive session (closed to the public) was held prior to the meeting to discuss the matter in greater detail.

Speaking at times vaguely during the BOMA meeting, the board moved to investigate using a so-called state nuisance law to block an unidentified local resident’s public records requests.

City Attorney Craig Johnson said that state open records statutes provide the public with access to government documents. That statute, however, sets a limit where if multiple records requests become disruptive to the government then the city can seek an injunction.   

Alderman Julie Anderson added that the city had to prove the requester had to have the intent to be disruptive.

Mayor Joey Hobbs said that the threshold number of records requests had been met, and multiple letters warning the requester about their number of requests had been sent, as required by state law.  

Anderson made a motion to postpone the matter until the city attorney could confer with the state comptroller’s office regarding state open records law, but it failed with Mayor Joey Hobbs casting the tie breaking vote to move the matter forward.

“I am very uncomfortable with the prospect of wading into something like this to restrict citizen’s access to open records without getting the best and most current advice we can. I am concerned this is a bad look for the city,” Anderson said, acknowledging that some records requests have become “burdensome” to the city. 

French added a friendly amendment to ask if the statute would be defined as excessive if multi-departmental requests were submitted on one request form for multiple documentations up to and over 50 documents came on one request and spanned multiple issues. 

Alderman James Threet, who was absent from the executive session and was not informed of its content, compared the situation to out-of-state school system requests that resulted in significant charges to the public.

“I generally think the public is entitled to look at public records,” Threet said. “I’m not saying this request is warranted because I don’t know what it is. But the rub is what is out of bounds and what is not.”

Vice Mayor Mark Messick said he wanted the public to know that the city is not trying to hide anything. He also voiced confidence in the legal advice from Johnson.

Addressing Threet, Messick said that if he had been at the executive session his contribution to the discussion would have been better informed.

The motion passed 4-2 with Aldermen Anderson and Threet voting no. 

In a later interview, Manchester Alderman Thomas Crosslin spoke with the Times about a proposed lawsuit by the city that would seek to block a records request by an unnamed citizen.

Crosslin said that the action approved by the Board of Mayor and Aldermen during the March 3 meeting was not taken lightly and the suit is not intended to block transparency by the city.

“We do not turn away reasonable records requests. We have never turned away public records requests,” he said.

“No reasonable person would think that these requests are things that could be accommodated over and over again.”

Public records requests are received through the Finance Department, and depending on the nature of the request, can involve the city department head spending hours researching the documents asked for.

The requests in questions, according to the context of Tuesday’s BOMA meeting, were single submissions, but list over 20 documents that span multiple departments.

Crosslin said he felt it is important that the city resolves the issue within the guidelines of state statutes.

“I understand the optics are not good. At the surface it looks like we are trying to prevent transparency. That is not the case at all. What we are trying to do is manage a situation that is preventing our city employees from doing their jobs,” Crosslin said.

Debra Fisher of the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government revealed there is no limit on records that the public can request even though the agency is given a reasonable amount of time to fulfill the request.

“There is no limit on how many records a citizen can request,” she said concerning the limitation of public records requests. “Citizens have the right to review any public record.”

She said the exception is classified records which may have portions redacted before they are handed over to the requestor.

As for the law which the government is using to seek the injunction, she said it was passed in 2020 and involves an intentional attempt to hamper the government process. She noted that the city must prove the requestor was filing for public records in order to impede government. As far as she knows, this is the first test of the 2020 law.