Jefferson City, Missouri – Catherine Hanaway starts her job as Missouri’s new attorney general with more than 120 Sunshine Law requests that are still unresolved. She took the oath of office in a private ceremony on Monday morning. She is now in a position of legal authority and public responsibility.
Stephanie Whitaker, a spokeswoman for the attorney general’s office, said that there are currently 126 petitions that are still pending. The number is high compared to most state agencies, but it is a big improvement from what Hanaway’s predecessor, Andrew Bailey, had to deal with when he took office in 2023. Bailey took over 224 requests that were still open at that time. That number later climbed to over 400. Some people in Missouri had to wait months or even years to see public documents.
The Sunshine Law is meant to make sure that the public can see government meetings and documents. This makes the topic of transparency very important for the attorney general’s office. Bailey assigned five staff members—four lawyers, an intern, and a records custodian—to handle the growing number of requests. Between January and July of this year, the office handled more than 400 submissions, which brought the pending list down to its current number.
Even if things are getting better, delays are still a concern. One pending request from 2024 needs more than 40,000 documents and is still taking a lot of time. Whitaker did say, though, that big requests can’t hold up the processing of smaller, newer ones any longer. Critics complained that the rigid first-come, first-served policy caused longer delays, thus the office has moved away from it.
Even with these adjustments, some records still take a lot longer than they should to come out. The Independent asked for access to Bailey’s public calendar in May. Many state offices can satisfy these requests in a matter of days, yet the documents were only given out last week, months later. This is, nevertheless, better than a similar request that took more than ten months to process.
Bailey, who is leaving early to become co-deputy director of the FBI, told lawmakers earlier this year that the office had received almost 1,500 Sunshine Law petitions since January 2023 and had addressed more than 1,300 of them. Governor Mike Kehoe was able to appoint Hanaway, a former U.S. attorney and speaker of the Missouri House, to take over the job after he resigned.
Now, with 126 requests still outstanding, Hanaway has to deal with both the progress and the problems left by her predecessor. People will be watching attentively how well she handles the backlog because her office is in charge of implementing the very regulations that require transparency.
