By Kris Cundiff 

Journalists and news organizations have long been strong voices for the public’s right to know. They’re even more effective when they join forces with other newsrooms to push for greater government transparency and accountability.

In 1997, seven Indiana newspapers banded together to conduct an unprecedented test of Indiana’s public access laws. The news outlets sent reporters to all 92 counties in the state to request certain public records, including death certificates and crime logs. Their findings, outlined in a 1998 series of articles called “The State of Secrecy,” concluded that Indiana’s public access laws were “often ignored and unenforced.”

“The State of Secrecy” was a powerful project that helped shape Indiana’s public access laws into what we know today. In response to the series, the state legislature passed new reforms, including statutes that permanently established the Office of the Public Access Counselor.

Through those statutes, Indiana lawmakers set up a path for the press and the public to enforce the state’s public access laws without being forced to take a dispute to court, creating a formal complaint process for challenging public records request denials via OPAC. Under the law, the entire process should take no more than a month.

In creating OPAC, state lawmakers envisioned an office that is responsive to Hoosiers seeking to exercise their right of public access under the law. Unfortunately, that’s not what OPAC is today. As the Reporters Committee’s Indiana-based attorney, I’ve heard from numerous journalists across the state that OPAC is dragging its feet in response to their complaints, flouting statutory deadlines that are crystal clear in the law.

So in July, news organizations once again banded together to fight for greater transparency. On behalf of a media coalition, I sent a letter to Public Access Counselor Jennifer Ruby, raising concerns about the office’s unresponsiveness and requested a meeting to start a dialogue.

The letter states that members of the coalition have consistently had to wait many months just to receive confirmation that their complaint was forwarded to the public agency at issue — something the PAC is supposed to do “immediately” — and have waited even longer for an advisory opinion that, by law, they should receive within 30 days. It also notes that in the past year, coalition members have been unable to reliably connect with OPAC staff by phone, email, or in person with informal inquiries, as required by law.

The “end result is that instead of helping facilitate agencies’ compliance with public records laws, the OPAC has become a black hole into which complaints disappear indefinitely,” the letter argues.

OPAC has faced challenges in recent years, including a 2024 law that chipped away at the office’s power and independence from politics. When Ruby took office in 2025, state officials said OPAC faced a backlog of cases.

A recent IndyStar analysis found that during Ruby’s 16-month tenure, OPAC took an average of nearly 250 days to issue an advisory opinion — more than eight times longer than what’s required by the law. IndyStar also found that Ruby ruled in favor of government agencies in two-thirds of published opinions, contrary to her predecessor Luke Britt, who sided in favor of the public in two-thirds of cases analyzed by the Star.

The media coalition letter acknowledged that some delay during a transition period is inevitable. But the PAC’s annual reports from the last decade show that while the office is expected to receive an uptick in complaints this year, it’s not facing a dramatic increase that would excuse a significant backlog over more than a year.

The coalition has requested a meeting with OPAC to discuss these concerns and consider possible solutions. If OPAC doesn’t want to start a dialogue, we’re prepared to take legal action.

Before I joined the Reporters Committee, I worked for nearly seven years at OPAC, so I know how the office is supposed to operate. We don’t want to have an adversarial relationship with OPAC. We just want the office to follow the law.

If you have issues with OPAC, reach out to me at kcundiff@rcfp.org. I’m always here to help with any legal questions you have in the course of reporting.

Kris Cundiff is the Indiana Local Legal Initiative attorney at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. He lives just outside of Indianapolis.