Readers know I am absolutely for this –wrote about it here.
Government entities in Somervell County, including the Sheriff’s Dept, Water Board, Glen Rose ISD, City of Glen Rose, and Somervell County Hospital District have ONE person who is designated to handle public information requests. But Somervell County does not. There is not a public information administrator, and Michelle Reynolds is not required to handle an requests. From a practical standpoint what this means is that you and I quite often have to figure out which department actually has the open record we would like to ask for, and we might get it wrong. For me, I have asked Michelle if she would mind me ccing her on a request so that my request doesn’t simply go into the void but has some sort of paper trail, and in case she knows who it should go to, if she would please forward, and that has worked well. Again, it is not her job to handle the requests herself
Michelle Reynolds, who is an absolutely fabulous and professional person, had explained to me earlier in August about retention schedules. What the below says is that each entity in Somervell County govt signs a form that says they are individually the ones responsible for fulfilling an open records request, according to a retention schedule for keeping those records, that comes to that person. (See the link for an example)
What she did, fairly recently, and kudos to her for doing this, it is very smart, is have the various offices in Somervell County sign a form indicating that they are responsible for the open records according to retention schedules. (Retention schedules most recently came up in an election board meeting ) Here is one signed example of the SLRM form 512 as signed by Danny Chambers. Some points on this. “The undersigned elected county officeholder (check box) will serve as records management officer (RMO) for the offer as provided by Local Gov Code 203.001.”
That’s why I was quite excited to see this on the agenda for the August 29 meeting.
The commissioners discussed, decided upon and voted to have all records requests for Somervell County government (does not include the Sheriff’s Dept, you can see what the Sheriff does here; I also assume does not include Somervell County Hospital District, Somervell County Water District, Somervell County Appraisal District, GRISD or of course City of Glen Rose since they already have their own procedures and were not discussed in this meeting) to go to an email address that Eddie of IT will set up, and then update the webpage to show that email, as well as one physical mailing address. That email will be monitored by Haley of HR and she will be responsible for sending it to the appropriate person for fulfillment. That person, in turn, is responsible for following the rules of how to process a public information request according to the Texas Public Information Act. (It’s not clear to me if Haley will be designated the public information officer, but definitely will be the point person to route requests). In the interim while this is being setup, any requests any department sends will be forwarded to Haley
This is a great move to ensure, at a minimum, that requests do not fall through the cracks by setting an official way to handle them. Kudos to the Commissioners!
