COMMENTARY: The inertia toward secrecy in government

Saturday marked the end of Sunshine Week, a national celebration of transparency and open government. It’s a great moment to reflect on how essential a responsive system of public records is to holding our leaders accountable and helping our society better live up to its ideals.

In the past year or so in Nevada, public records have helped bring to light a lack of oversight on Elon Musk’s Boring Co. tunnels in Las Vegas, revealed surveillance on protesters at the Thacker Pass lithium mine, uncovered collaboration between ICE and the DMV on a disappearing-message app and raised questions about the efficacy of a school bus stop-arm camera program that is set to vastly expand, just to name a few.

Bringing these matters of public concern to the forefront is so much harder to do when governments throw roadblocks into the process — often through fees.

Nevada journalists requesting records regularly hear from government agencies that it will cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars to fulfill a request for emails, video footage or official calendars because someone will be redacting them.

Officials with the city of Reno recently said they would turn over body-worn camera footage of a single incident with a citizen only if the requester coughed up as much as $2,000.

Public records abuses come in several forms. In the past year in Nevada, we’ve seen:

Carson City supervisors trying to boost fees, including a $34 an hour charge to pay a deputy to monitor citizens as they view body-worn camera footage.

The city of Reno using body-worn camera redaction fees to balance its budget.

The Washoe County School District’s paralegal saying the district would turn over emails related to playground safety only if the journalist requester agreed to pay for school staff time to gather, review and redact the requested records.

Truckee Meadows Community College giving itself 30 days to respond to public records requests, only to deny the records request after a month.

These fees are often justified as covering the costs of staff work to fulfill requests. Such responses serve to make the process almost instantly out of reach to the average citizen and available only to paid special interests.

Not only is it undemocratic, but it’s against the Legislature’s intent. In 2019, when Nevada lawmakers updated the public records law, they narrowed the scope of fees governments are allowed to charge, cutting out allowances for staff time and limiting allowable charges to material costs such as paper and toner.

When a bill from 2025 — Assembly Bill 51 — sought to allow governments to charge “reasonable fees for the use of its personnel or technological resources,” it died without so much as a hearing.

These are profound moves by the Legislature — ones that affirm the fact that documents created at taxpayer expense and chronicling the work of government belong to the public and should be as accessible to everyday people as possible.

Local governments around the state, however, claim they have the right to charge the public for government employees to produce public records. More are proposing to adopt policies to charge staff time to make public the records that belong to citizens.

In a world where corrupt governments are the norm, citizens making public records requests — and government agencies fulfilling them — should be viewed as healthy acts of patriotism rather than a nuisance. Public officials who know their conduct will be brought to light are bound to behave better than those who assume secrecy. Policymakers who know their constituents will follow up on their promises are bound to do more to fulfill them.

There will always be inertia in the direction of secrecy. But we stand to gain much more as a society if we fight to ensure public information is as easy for the public to get as possible.

Michelle Rindels is president of the Nevada Open Government Coalition. Bob Conrad is a member of the coalition. Citizens interested in learning more about how to use the state’s public records process should sign up for coalition’s educational webinar, set for April 7 at 1 p.m.