Since January, the Pioneer has filed thirteen requests under Wisconsin’s public records law with county and village offices. Eight produced records. Four were denied. One — the one that matters most this month — remains open. This column, which will run monthly, is the scoreboard: what we asked for, who answered, how long it took, and what came back. The law belongs to everyone in the county, not just to newspapers, and the way it is honored — or not — is itself news.
First, the tally. Of the eight requests filled, response times ranged from four days — the Village of Trempealeau clerk’s office, which sent levee engineering invoices the same week we asked — to eleven weeks for a set of county email records that arrived in March after two written follow-ups. The median was about three weeks. Wisconsin’s statute does not set a fixed deadline; it requires a custodian to respond “as soon as practicable and without delay.” Courts and the attorney general have read that to mean roughly ten working days for simple requests. Most county offices are landing near that mark. Some are not.
as soon as practicable and without delay
Wisconsin public records law, Wis. Stat. 19.35(4)(a)
The four denials break down this way. One request was refused as a personnel matter, with the office citing the privacy interests of an employee under internal review. One was withheld under attorney-client privilege, tied to pending litigation. One was rejected as “overly broad” — a label the law permits only when a request has no reasonable limitation as to subject matter or time, which we dispute, and which we have since refiled in narrower form. The fourth received no response at all: no denial, no acknowledgment, nothing. Under Wisconsin law, silence is treated as a denial, and it is the least defensible kind, because it deprives the requester of the specific reasons the statute requires a custodian to state in writing.
A word about how denials are supposed to work. Wisconsin starts from a presumption of complete public access. A custodian who wants to withhold a record must either point to a specific statutory exception or apply what the courts call the balancing test: weighing the public interest in disclosure against the public interest in keeping the record closed. The burden sits with the government, not the requester, and “it would be embarrassing” does not tip the scale. Every denial must be in writing and must give reasons. A requester who believes a denial is wrong can ask the district attorney or the attorney general to act, or go to court.
This month’s open item is the one we are watching most closely. On June 24, the Pioneer requested the sheriff’s office’s search logs for its Flock Safety license-plate reader system — records showing who queried the county’s cameras, when, and for what stated reason. Flock’s system generates these audit logs automatically, so the records exist and are retrievable. The request matters because the county board will vote in August on Supervisor Parrish’s motion to terminate the Flock contract, and the logs are the only public accounting of how the cameras have actually been used. As the paper goes to press, the request remains open: no records yet, and no denial either. We will report what we receive — and how long it takes — in this space.