Governor's Office Responds To Lawsuit Filed By Liberal Media And Advocacy Groups | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Raleigh, N.C. — This administration is a champion of transparency and fair and legitimate news gathering. Fulfilling records requests is vital part of meeting those goals.

    However, some members of the media and political organizations are exploiting the public records law and filing overly-broad and duplicative records requests that gum up the day-to-day operations of state government. Now, a coalition of liberal news media outlets and advocacy groups have taken this exploitation to a new level with a coordinated lawsuit that ignores the facts.

    The facts are the McCrory administration has been asked to fulfill more than 22,000 records request, or roughly 170 every business week. The breadth of some of these requests is staggering. One advocacy group's records request was so broad, it produced more than 5 million emails after the computer search was halted after 6 days. The narrowed search, now 6 days old, is expected to return approximately 1 million e-mails that must be individually reviewed to protect legally confidential information and the privacy of our citizens.

    This onslaught of public records requests forced us to upgrade the outdated and unsupported technology we inherited used to facilitate and manage public records requests. At the cost of $1.7 million, more than 2.2 billion emails from nearly 95,000 mailboxes of current and former state employees are being transferred to a new, more efficient record retrieval system.

    State funding to hire additional personnel to meet the growing and massive requests from many for profit media and non-profit advocacy and political groups is not available unless the money is taken from priority services needed by the public. Now, this lawsuit will require us to hire more lawyers at taxpayers' expense to respond to this baseless and ridiculous lawsuit.

    Like the requests themselves, this lawsuit is an attempt to tie up state personnel and resources that should be spent serving the people of North Carolina.

• Contact: Crystal Feldman
•     govpress@nc.gov