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Article written by by Erica Olsen, CEO, Madison AI
A quiet crisis is unfolding in city halls and county offices across the country.
The public is more engaged than ever. People want to know how their tax dollars are spent and how policy gets made, and they have every right to ask. But a new reality is making it harder for local governments to keep up: a flood of public records requests generated by AI.
Generative AI has made it effortless to fire off massive, sprawling records requests with a single click. And this is no longer just individuals. Entire companies have now built teams whose only job is to submit public records requests at scale, then resell that information to vendors and the private sector. For the government staff on the receiving end, the result is a crushing workload.
This is not going away. AI-driven requests are only going to get more frequent, and more aggressive.
Public Servants Are Drowning
Faced with that workload, some lawmakers are moving to charge for access. California’s Assembly Bill 1821, authored by Assemblymember Blanca Pacheco and recently examined by CalMatters, is one early example. The bill would let public agencies charge an uncapped fee when a request takes staff more than two hours to research, plus an added fee when staff spend more than 10 hours in a single month on requests from the same person.
California is not alone. As open records requests surge nationwide, agencies everywhere are weighing how to recover the cost.
And if you know how local government actually works, the motivation is easy to understand. Every hour spent on records requests is an hour pulled from other essential work: processing business permits, maintaining public archives, running elections.
The numbers are staggering.
A single request in Chula Vista, California required 150 to 300 staff hours.In Fontana, one person filed more than 100 requests with the stated goal of disrupting operations, costing the city over $300,000 in legal and staffing expenses.
Versions of that story are playing out in communities across the country. Call it what it is: administrative warfare, waged one records request at a time.
The Backlog Isn’t Just Expensive.
It’s a Compliance Risk.
Cost and burnout are only part of the story. The bigger risk is compliance.
Public records laws don’t just encourage agencies to respond. They require it, on a clock. Under the California Public Records Act, an agency generally has 10 days to determine whether it will produce records, and similar deadlines exist in nearly every state. Those timelines were written for a world of paper files and the occasional request, not for an inbox flooded by AI.
When volume outruns staff, deadlines start slipping. And a missed deadline is not a minor administrative hiccup. It is legal exposure. Requesters who sue to force production and prevail are routinely awarded attorney’s fees, so a single backlog can become a court order plus a legal bill the taxpayers ultimately pay.
That leaves agencies in a genuine bind. Do nothing, and they risk falling out of compliance with the very laws meant to keep government open. Charge a fee, and they risk pricing residents out of access. Neither path actually protects the public.
Fee bills like AB 1821 are an understandable response from an exhausted system trying to protect itself. The intent is worthwhile, and the compensation it offers is fair. But there is a faster, more effective fix.
Upgrade the Tools, Not the Toll
That is exactly what we built at Madison AI. Our public records fulfillment model safely retrieves, sorts, and redacts municipal records, turning a workflow that once took several days into one that takes about an hour.
It handles the heavy lifting end to end: automated intake tagging, near-duplicate detection, AI-assisted redaction, and complete audit trails that keep agencies compliant with retention and privacy laws.
The preliminary results are striking. In Washoe County, Nevada, our development partner, the public records assistant is delivering up to 90% time savings, cutting as much as 9 to 10 hours of staff work off a single request. A request that once cost roughly $1,000 or more to complete using legacy software and staff labor can now be fulfilled for about $150, all in, including staff labor, with AI handling the heavy lifting. Palm Springs and Culver City, California are rolling out the same model next.
And this is not a one-size-fits-all product. We tailor each assistant to an agency’s specific workflows and data, built alongside the people who live these operational realities every day. The same approach works for a small town or a large county, in any state.
Taxing Transparency Isn’t the Right Solution
Let’s be honest: this is an incredibly hard problem, and lawmakers are not working with many good options. When staff are drowning and budgets are stretched thin, charging for the most extreme requests can look like the only lever left to pull.
But a fee is still a paywall. And a paywall on public records does the very thing public records law exists to prevent: it reduces the public’s access to information. The people priced out are rarely the bad actors gaming the system. They are ordinary residents, parents, and neighbors trying to understand their own government.
Because at the end of the day, everyone wants the same thing: a government that is open, accountable, and transparent. We do not have to choose between protecting public servants from burnout and protecting that access.
So we urge lawmakers, in California and beyond, to consider a different path. What if a state created a safe harbor for agencies that adopt an AI-first response model? What if requesters used an automated portal before submitting follow-ups? What if agencies that deployed credible AI platforms, met basic public records criteria in good faith, and resolved the bulk of public inquiries earned more latitude on response timing and cost recovery?
That approach rewards genuine transparency instead of taxing it. Let’s uphold the spirit of open government and give local governments the technology to make transparency the default.
A strategist and author of Strategic Planning for Dummies, Erica’s spent 20 years helping thousands of organizations make big-bold visions a reality. Today, she’s driving the vision of returning 5 hours/week to every staff member and elected so they can focus on service to their communities