If Gilbert wants to hide public records, it's going about it all wrong

Yahoo

15-04-2025

Perhaps the citizen naysayers are right.
Perhaps this is all nefarious and underhanded — these Gilbert Town Council members asking sharp questions about public information requests.
After all, they represent a town that fell asleep on the 'Gilbert Goons,' the gang of thugs who violently preyed on mostly young men in Gilbert and surrounding communities.
They're also on a council that has been at war with itself, filled with angry insults and a half-dozen ethics complaints.
Now, some of those same town leaders are asking about the so-called 'frequent flyers,' the citizens or even non-citizens who keep requesting public information from the town — detailed statistics, email exchanges, text messages, police records, you name it.
The requests for public information are so vast today and rising that the town now must budget $2.1 million a year simply to process them all, town Clerk Chaveli Herrera said.
In 2024, Gilbert responded to some 27,328 total record requests across multiple departments — more than Mesa, a city nearly twice its size, The Arizona Republic's Maritza Dominguez reports.
Some Gilbert citizens didn't like the questions asked by Council Members Chuck Bongiovanni and Jim Torgeson, suggesting there was something vaguely intimidating about them.
Interestingly, Bongiovanni and Torgeson both won election promising greater transparency on a council riven with controversy.
I've never interviewed these men. Don't know them. So, I went to the video of their March 25 council study session to see what all the fuss was about.
What I saw at the start was a town attorney and clerk tell the council that there is almost no give in the Arizona Public Record statutes. Anybody can request information, and the town must provide it.
There are exceptions, but they are few. And they had better pass muster with the courts, Town Attorney Chris Payne said.
This is a healthy system in a democracy that depends on informed citizens electing town and city leaders.
Opinion: Surprise! The First Amendment is against the rules in this Arizona city
But the system can be abused, and in Gilbert and across the United States there are cranks and conspiracy theorists who like to put town halls through expensive exercises of mass data collection and processing.
Some people make broad requests for official email exchanges over many years — all of which require sorting and eventually vetting by the town's legal arm.
An example was a request last August for 3,100 emails with 730 attachments (some with multiple pages), Payne said. That took about 40 hours and $2,000 in staff time.
And it was hardly unusual. In fact, that request was small compared to others that are broader and require many times more staff hours, Payne said.
The town attorney's office spends upwards of $350,000 a year just to vet public information queries, he said.
Hearing all this, Bongiovanni asked an essential question:
'Gilbert is a very prosperous town, and we can only afford $10,000 to help seniors and people on fixed income pay their water bill. And yet we can spend $400,000, $500,000 on wasteful FOIAs that we know are just being submitted as harassment.'
Neither Bongiovanni nor Torgeson were talking about mainstream media queries. They were referring to serial abusers of public information requests.
If this was an underhanded effort to turn off the spigot of information to the public, Torgeson sure didn't sound like a censorship fiend.
He asked the town attorney if there was a way to just grant people access to all of the council's communications. Could they be stored in a clearinghouse with public access, so Gilbert could save millions on processing and vetting?
'I have no problem opening up every email, every phone call, every text. I want the abuse of the tax dollars to stop. Because these few people are costing us hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars,' Torgeson said.
'If it can be done for a reasonable number and just open everything up, I have nothing to hide, and I'm sure no one here has anything to hide. I want to stop the abuse.'
Payne said, 'We'll look at that.'
The information would still need to be vetted. I'm sure Torgeson knows that.
But he didn't sound like a guy with secrets to keep. Nor did Bongiovanni. This looked more like a two-man DOGE session to ferret out waste, fraud and abuse.
Phil Boas is an editorial columnist with The Arizona Republic. Email him at [e-mail].
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Gilbert councilmen want to stop waste. That's no conspiracy | Opinion