The open records stonewalling is working

As a student journalist, I get exhausted managing my course load, a newspaper and the records custodians determined to deny us

Government officials have found a trick to keep the public from seeing what they are up to: They don’t have to always say no. They can simply make getting the records so difficult that nobody wants to try.

I spent the better part of a year fighting UMass Boston’s attempts to do just that when I requested access to public records for an investigation into the university’s involvement in a Vatican climate initiative published in the campus newspaper, The Mass Media, earlier this year. At each opportunity, administrators missed legal deadlines, claimed frivolous exemptions that the state’s supervisor of records rejected or questioned, and charged fees that exceeded $1,000.