Inside The N&O’s reporting on public records and transparency among NC lawmakers
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A test of transparency
The state budget passed by North Carolina legislators includes a new provision that gives lawmakers the authority to decide what public records, if any, to reveal. In this special report, The News & Observer tested how responsive lawmakers would be under the new provision.
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In mid-October, The News & Observer requested communications from all 170 members of the North Carolina General Assembly.
GOP state lawmakers had recently moved to shield all former and current legislators from having to comply with the state’s public records law, drawing objections from government transparency groups like the NC Open Government Coalition, and other groups on both sides of the aisle, including the ACLU of North Carolina and the John Locke Foundation.
To gauge how many lawmakers would continue to opt for transparency, The N&O asked every member of the House and Senate to provide all of their communications from a single day: Sept. 19, the day that Republican legislative leaders concluded months of negotiations on the budget.
A total of 38 lawmakers — 12 Republicans and 26 Democrats — provided The N&O with copies of their emails. The vast majority, more than 70%, did not respond to our request.
Reporting this story involved several steps: filing initial requests, following up with lawmakers, reviewing and processing their records, and publication. Here’s a breakdown of what went into this story.
Filing the request with lawmakers
To begin, The N&O emailed all 170 current members of the House and Senate a request for “copies of any and all correspondence that you sent or received on Tuesday, Sept. 19, 2023.”
The request asked for records in any format they were originally conveyed in, including print, digital, emails, text messages, voicemails or others.
Nearly all of the records The N&O received from lawmakers were emails. A few lawmakers also provided copies of texts, and one lawmaker provided a summary of voicemails and calls from constituents.
Organizing, processing and uploading emails we received
Once The N&O started receiving records in response to our request, we began the process of reviewing, organizing and uploading them to be published and viewed publicly.
Several lawmakers provided PDFs of their emails, but The N&O also received records in other formats, and in some cases converted them on our own or asked lawmakers to provide us with PDF copies.
Some lawmakers and their assistants responded to us directly. In other cases, staff from the General Assembly’s Information Systems Division provided us access to emails lawmakers had asked them to turn over.
During this process, The N&O also followed up with several lawmakers who had initially responded to our request, but hadn’t yet provided us with their emails.
After receiving emails in a usable format, we went through them. Some lawmakers provided just a handful of emails. Others provided hundreds of pages of emails.
The emails included messages from constituents across the state, many of whom wrote to lawmakers of both parties urging them not to support the now-shelved proposal crafted by GOP leaders to expand casinos in North Carolina. The N&O highlighted those pleas in a story last week. Other issues constituents wrote about included:
▪ Medicaid expansion
▪ Masking requirements
▪ Charter school funding
▪ Environmental issues
▪ The GOP’s recently-enacted “Parents’ Bill of Rights”
▪ Stricter regulations for firearms
The N&O published all of the emails it received, redacting only personal identifying information of constituents who wrote to lawmakers such as their names, email addresses, mailing addresses and phone numbers.
We also removed lengthy attachments that were included in some emails, such as drafts of the since-enacted budget and a related breakdown of spending levels that were each more than 600 pages long.
Read the lawmaker emails we obtained
Since publishing our stories last week, The N&O has received emails from a few more lawmakers. The N&O will continue to update these stories if it receives additional records.
This story was originally published January 18, 2024 at 9:00 AM with the headline "Inside The N&O’s reporting on public records and transparency among NC lawmakers."
