In one of Vermont’s largest towns, most of the requests officials get for public records aren’t coming from local residents. Instead, said Renae Marshall, Colchester’s deputy town manager, they’re coming from people — and companies — around the country.
The town is spending more and more time fielding requests from companies that aren’t based in Vermont but that collect and sell its public information for a profit, she said. There’s little or nothing illegal, Marshall acknowledged, about what those companies are doing. But she said the volume of corporate requests, combined with a limited window of time officials have to respond under state law, has been making it hard to keep up.
When it comes to Vermont’s Public Records Act, “there’s obviously room for some modernization,” she said in a recent interview at the town office.
Now, Colchester is turning to state lawmakers in hopes of some relief.
But a slate of changes Marshall and other town leaders are proposing, along with the Vermont League of Cities and Towns, has drawn sharp rebukes from leaders in the press and other advocates for open government.
The push is sparking debate about whether the state can enact any new limits, at all, on public records rules without hindering the public’s access to vital information.
“Right now, I don’t know how to balance it,” said Rep. Matt Birong, D-Vergennes, who chairs the Vermont House committee that’s been considering those proposals. “All I know is, we need to balance it if we move forward with something.”
Under Vermont’s Public Records Act, any person has the right to ask to view or get a copy of a public record from the state or local government. The law’s definition of a “public record” is broad, including “any written or recorded information, regardless of physical form or characteristics,” created while the government does its business.
Officials can generally charge fees for making copies of public records, but not if someone only wants to view, or “inspect,” records in-person. Additional fees can also be levied if a request takes more than 30 minutes to complete, which is often the case — especially if there’s information officials need to redact in the process. The Vermont State Police, for instance, may need to redact portions of body-worn camera footage before releasing it to protect crime victims’ privacy or safety.
Vermont’s law generally prevents state and local officials from considering or asking a person’s motivation for a request. Notably, too, there is a long list of types of records that are exempted from public access under the act — including trade secrets, law enforcement investigations and health care materials, among others.
It’s difficult to track exactly how many records requests are made each year, especially at the local level. The state Agency of Administration tracks requests filed with state agencies, though. According to a database on its website, there have been just shy of 30,000 public records requests filed with the state over the past seven years.
Colchester has proposed limiting access to public records in Vermont to only residents and businesses within the state. It’s also suggested a new restriction on when records of financial transactions can be produced digitally or are allowed to be photographed.
“The intent of the Vermont Public Records Act was to make state and local government more transparent and accountable to their citizens,” Marshall told Birong’s House Government Operations and Military Affairs Committee last month, pitching legislators on the ideas. “But it was not, purposefully, developed to provide easy access to public records for the financial or time-saving benefit of businesses outside of Vermont.”
Marshall said in an interview that the town at times gets several requests from out-of-state companies per week, though it’s not always that frequent.
She showed one example from last August: an employee of a Virginia-based company — called Records Retrieval Solutions — filed a request for electronic copies of “all purchase orders” the town had issued between January 2020 and June 2025.
The town doesn’t want to limit people’s access to public information, Marshall said. But it questions whether requests from companies are doing more harm than good.
Samantha Sheehan, a lobbyist for the Vermont League of Cities and Towns, said her organization regularly hears about similar requests being fielded around the state. She said companies will request a sometimes-large volume of information about local bids for services, then sell that data to contractors — perhaps those providing road salt or crack sealant — with advice on how those firms can craft more competitive bids.
Sheehan’s organization, which is the primary lobbying group in the Vermont Statehouse for municipal governments, has proposed its own slate of changes it says could help improve officials’ workload and prevent requests from burdening towns’ coffers.
One measure would increase the maximum amount of time officials have to respond to many records requests from three days to 14 days. Another would require officials to have explicitly denied a request before the requester could make a formal appeal. As it stands, an official’s nonresponse, after three days, can be considered a denial.
The group also wants to make it easier for towns to charge fees for many records made available for in-person viewing, not just for copies of those records, as state law lays out now. It can be challenging, as the law is written, for officials to recover the costs in staff time for the often tedious process of redacting private information from records before they are released, Sheehan said. The group has also suggested requiring “that a reasonable deposit be paid” before officials start the process of compiling records.
A final proposal would create a new definition in state law of “vexatious” records requests and allow officials to seek a court order relieving them of the need to comply with such asks. Maine has a similar law on the books, Sheehan noted last month.
Sheehan said in an interview that not every city or town across Vermont is dealing regularly with onerous records requests. There are probably four or five at a time, she estimated. But she said the requests are overwhelming some officials.
“They feel like they just can’t do their job,” Sheehan said. “If their job is treasurer, auditor, road commissioner, are they missing grant deadlines and bid deadlines under an overwhelming volume of requests from a single person? If so, that might be enough that they say, ‘We want to go through this vexatious request process and seek relief.’”
The issue was the focus of a Montpelier City Council meeting earlier this month. Evelyn Prim, the city’s acting manager, said one resident accounted for 70% of the 220 total public records requests filed there in 2025, The Montpelier Bridge reported last week.
Prim presented data at the meeting showing that public records requests took about 634 staff hours last year overall, and cost the city about $6,100 in attorney’s fees.
One councilor, Cary Brown, said it could be necessary for the city to hire a dedicated staffer to handle records requests. If the general public knew how much time and money was being spent on records requests, said another councilor, Adrienne Gil, “they would be outraged.”
‘A bad experience for everyone’
Any new restrictions on access to public records, though, are fraught proposals.
Groups representing Vermont’s newspapers and its TV and radio broadcasters have told the government operations panel they are broadly opposed to many, if not all, of the changes being proposed, characterizing them as steps in the wrong direction. Journalists frequently make public records requests to verify allegations and obtain data and other information that might not come into the public eye otherwise.
Giving officials more time to respond to many requests would delay that vital news gathering, Bridget Higdon, the publisher of four newspapers in northwestern Vermont and vice president of the Vermont Journalism Coalition, told the committee earlier this month. More fees, meanwhile, would be a burden on low-income people and smaller news organizations, she said.
David Cuillier, director of the Brechner Freedom of Information Project at the University of Florida, which researches public records access across the country, in an interview called the changes being considered in Vermont this year “absolutely horrid.” He said the changes would “make Vermont one of the most secretive states in the nation.”
Access to public records needs to be improved around the country, according to Cuillier. While requests from companies are nothing new, he said, there’s been “a huge surge” in recent years as technology has made it easier to “swing out hundreds of public records requests at once.”
At the same time, he said, the technology many towns have available on their ends to store and search records is falling behind the times.
“It’s a bad experience for everyone, all around — and getting worse all the time,” Cuillier said. “It’s bad for government agencies. It’s bad for requesters. It’s bad for democracy.”
Vermont’s House Government Operations Committee has been taking testimony from public records officers in local and state government since the start of this year’s legislative session in January. The panel is considering creating a bill incorporating at least some of those changes, according to Birong, the committee’s chair.
But it’s not clear yet which, if any, would make it over the finish line.
Cuillier said that rather than allow towns to take “vexatious” requesters to court, Vermont should establish an independent body to oversee the government’s compliance with public records laws as well as provide a non-judicial avenue for residents to challenge denials of their requests. That’s what Connecticut has had in place for decades, he noted, referring to that state’s Freedom of Information Commission.
The Vermont Journalism Coalition, of which VTDigger is a member, has argued that more data needs to be collected on the impact of “vexatious” requests on towns before any policy changes are put in place.
Cuillier also questioned whether it’s really all that bad for companies to be soliciting public information. If the result is that bids for services are more competitive, and that saves taxpayer money in the long run, then the effort could be beneficial, he said.
Alex Torpey, the interim town manager in Rockingham, agrees. His town gets a relatively small number of records requests. But at least this year, many, if not all of them, have been from companies, not local residents, he said. Torpey also runs an online group, through his consulting firm, with about 80 other local leaders from around Vermont and New Hampshire.
He said in an interview he doesn’t agree with Colchester’s idea of restricting access to public records only to people and other entities based in the state. But he suggested a different change to the law whereby corporate requesters would get charged higher fees to access records. Cuillier also backed that idea, saying it could be combined with reducing, or eliminating outright, the cost of records for local residents.
Corporate access to records isn’t a bad thing, Torpey argued — but “I’m just not sure that these taxpayers in each town should be the ones footing the bill for it.”
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Disclaimer: VTDigger is a member of the Vermont Journalism Coalition. No members of VTDigger’s staff who are involved in advocating for or against changes to the Public Records Act were involved in the reporting, writing or editing of this story.
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This story was originally published by VTDigger and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.
