Requests for public records have doubled in the past five years. Here's what the city is doing about it.

Albuquerque is facing a rising tide of public information requests, according to city officials. The city paid at least $300,000 in lawsuit settlements related to public records requests in the first quarter of the fiscal year, according to data from a report prepared by the city legal department.

The city received more than 12,000 public records requests last year, City Clerk Ethan Watson said during a presentation to the Albuquerque City Council last week. That number is double the number of requests five years ago, Watson said.

“Most cities in New Mexico are experiencing more and more requests each year and more and more litigation each year,” Watson said. The majority of requests are related to the Albuquerque Police Department, and about half of those are related to traffic accidents, he said.

The city is trying to address the issue by digitizing more paper records and making some popular reports available online.

“The city still has a large number of paper records,” Watson said. “Last year, we digitized over a million records, including from the last two years, all of the city’s HR files. But on a day-to-day basis, we’re still working with a ton of paper records.”

The Inspection of Public Records Act helps New Mexicans access public records from state and local governments. Some records are exempt. If someone is denied access to records, they can take legal action.

A small group of people send most of the requests, Watson said — 40 send more than 100 requests per year. So city staffers are reaching out to requesters to try and streamline requests.

The city is also adding additional staff to deal with records requests. Eight staff members were added in the last budget, and the city is hiring 10 for the next fiscal year.

City staff are also attempting to reduce the number of requests that go uncollected by checking in with requesters every 90 days to see if they still want the record.

Executive Director for New Mexico Counties Joy Esparsen said she doesn’t know a single county in the state that isn’t struggling with an increase in public records requests. She believes the Inspection of Public Records Act has been weaponized and that some people are submitting broad requests to intentionally slow down public services. She thinks there should be changes to the law.

“I think it’s really exploded incrementally over the last decade,” Esparsen said. “I think especially with some of the controversies that we’ve seen with elections ... the polarizing nature and concerns about elections have just kind of educated the public of how to use IPRA as a weapon to be an obstructionist, which was never the intent of the law.”

New Mexico’s 1978 public records act is one of the best in the nation, said Melanie Majors, executive director of the nonprofit New Mexico Foundation for Open Government.

“Public records are the first step to the public understanding what their government is doing, how their tax dollars are being spent, and what is being done on their behalf,” Majors said.

If more records were placed online in websites or databases, records custodians would have an easier job, Majors said. She also thinks reports that contain redactable information could be redesigned so that redactable information is all in one spot and redacting is simpler.

“Records all belong to us as taxpayers,” Majors said. “Everything that is kept, is kept in trust for the taxpayer, and as such, shouldn’t we be able to go and get our information when we want to look at it?”