LAWTON – The City Council again expressed its concerns about “an abundance” of open records requests – more than 27,000 most recently – from the news media that require multiple employees to fulfill and cost local taxpayers thousands of dollars.
“We have been overloaded with requests for all types of documents,” Councilman George Gill said during the City Council meeting June 10.
A seemingly routine question about public records led to the disclosure at a May 27 City Council meeting that multiple ‘open records’ requests were submitted by individuals associated with KSWO-TV seeking emails pertaining to Lawton’s mayor and the Lawton City Council Relations Liaison.
On Feb. 24, KSWO “investigative reporter” Seth Marsicano filed a Public Records Request with City Hall in which he requested “all email exchanges sent to and from Lawton Mayor Stan Booker’s email between the dates of January 1, 2024, to February 24, 2025.”
The request for every email the mayor sent or received during that 14-month period “was worded very broadly,” Lawton City Clerk Donalynn Blazek-Scherler said. The request was described by sources as “basically a fishing expedition” because Marsicano did not specify what he was looking for in those emails.
The city clerk said she “reached out” to an implementation consultant with CivicPlus, the vendor for the city’s “NextRequest” open records software, “because the system would start processing a few documents tied to” Marsicano’s Open Records request “and then it would freeze.”
When the CivicPlus representative “looked into it on his end, he told me it was the largest request he had ever seen,” Blazek-Scherler told Southwest Ledger. “According to him, the system wasn’t able to handle that much data being processed at once, which explained the issue we were experiencing.”
Subsequently, Blazek-Scherler said, Marsicano withdrew his initial request and amended it by submitting five separate open records requests. Those requests were not in the form of sentences; instead, Marsicano seeks emails “sent to and from Lawton Mayor Stan Booker’s city email address” during a 16-month period, from January 1, 2024, to April 1, 2025, which contained any of approximately four dozen “keywords or replies to emails which contain the same keywords” about city finances, Lawton’s fire and police departments, the City Code and the City Charter, homelessness.
Other “keywords” Marsicano listed included “KSWO, channel 7, Justin Rose, Seth Marsicano, 7News, Sharicka Brackens, Kelvin Mize, news, reporter.”
“What are they afraid of, that we’re talking about them behind their back?” the mayor wondered aloud.
Marsicano’s five open records requests “came to a total of 27,507 emails,” the city clerk told the Ledger. “It took our IT Department 1.5 hours to retrieve the records.” From there, the records were sent to a legal assistant for redaction of personal and/or proprietary details. “She is currently processing this request at 166 emails an hour, so her total time spent will be 167 hours,” Blazek-Scherler wrote. “She has to fit this in between her usual duties, so it is taking some extra time.”
In the next step, the city clerk related, “It will go to an attorney for legal review (also estimating 167 hours of dedicated time to do this), and then to me for final review and release (I'm anticipating this will take me about an hour and a half ).”
City employees are still responding to Marsicano’s records requests, Blazek-Scherler told the Ledger on June 12. Marsicano’s “five modified requests” were “still in legal review” that day, she wrote. “I checked in on these this past Tuesday, and the first of the five requests was still around 235 emails short of being redacted by the legal assistant. She anticipated having her portion complete by the end of this week or early next week.”
In addition, Marsicano subsequently submitted an open records request for all emails to and from City Council Relations Liaison Julia Mantzke since her date of hire, Blazek-Scherler said. Mantzke “has been with the city for almost a year,” the city clerk said.
Councilman Randy Warren asked how many employees have been engaged full- or part-time procuring the records to comply with TV7’s requests. Blazek-Scherler told Southwest Ledger that answering Marsicano’s multiple requests has required the efforts of two paralegals and one attorney.
That, and the hours they consumed in retrieving and reviewing those records, helps explain why the City Council was told last month that complying with KSWO’s first open records request would have cost local residents an estimated $67,000 to comply with fully.
The City of Lawton has “a duty to provide those records” and residents of the community “have to pay for that, but by state law the media doesn’t,” Councilman Gill noted.
Booker said city officials “want the press to watch the government,” but to do so “ethically, accurately, and in service of the public interest – not personal interest or revenge.”
The mayor urged the news media to conduct “more investigative reporting – the kind that helps propel our city forward.”
He suggested stories about “what we can do differently to deliver city services to our community at rates that are at or below our peer cities;” “what other cities are providing in the way of low- or nocost family entertainment;” how Lawton “measures up” on arts and humanities; comparing “quality sports programs” for youngsters in Lawton versus what’s available in other communities; and the city’s current emphasis on improvements to its water, sewer and streets infrastructure.
In short, he said, stories that “help citizens make informed decisions about their community, coverage that helps us benchmark against other cities and understand what works, journalism that drives important conversations about our future.”
Marsicano, who joined KSWO in October 2022, announced last week on LinkedIn that he is leaving the station next month. “At the end of July I will be moving on to the next chapter of my career,” he wrote. “I’m actively looking at other opportunities…”
Southwest Ledger called KSWO and left a message for Marsicano but he never responded.
In future issues the Ledger will bring its readers more stories about abuses of Oklahoma’s Open Records Act. Next week: More than 200 open records requests have been filed in a small eastern Oklahoma community by a former town trustee whose seat was vacated.