Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey speaks Jan. 20, 2023, to the Missouri chapter of the Federalist Society on the Missouri House of Representatives dais (Annelise Hanshaw/Missouri Independent).
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey said Thursday that the backlog of public records requests his office has struggled to work through for years is finally over.
Testifying to the Missouri Senate Appropriations Committee, Bailey said his office has received 1,465 requests under the Sunshine Law since he took over in January 2023 — and managed to complete work on 1,390 of those requests.
There are 75 requests that have not been completed, he said, including 35 that were submitted since the start of this year.
“We feel confident we have cleared the backlog,” Bailey said.
When he took over the attorney general’s office, Bailey inherited 224 unfinished requests that had been submitted by the public to former Attorney General Eric Schmitt.
Some of the inherited requests had been pending for two years.
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To tackle the backlog, Bailey assigned new staff to the problem and implemented a policy to work through requests on a first come, first serve basis. That meant newer inquiries that were small and easily dispensed with sat in limbo as staff worked on older and more expansive requests.
Critics argued Bailey’s strategy exacerbated the problem, letting requests pile up and ensuring the backlog took even longer to work through. That criticism was amplified by the fact that the attorney general’s office is the agency that enforces the Sunshine Law in Missouri.
State Sen. Maggie Nurrenbern, a Kansas City Democrat, said that 75 pending requests is still too many.
“We still have a pretty significant backlog there,” she said, “so that’s something concerning.”
Bailey said he would prefer his office have “zero pending requests, and would rather we turn them out more rapidly.”
“But the problem,” he said, “is the complexity of the records we have to review, because so many of them are legal files, and so a request may trigger a response of 50,000 documents that we have to go through, line by line to ensure we’re not breaching attorney client privilege.”