Texans For Public Justice

 
9/6/01

Rep. Rick Green
P.O. Box 2910
Austin, Texas 78768-2910

Dear Rep. Green:

 Thank you for your July 16, 2001 response to our request for records pertaining to legislative continuances.  Your correspondence states, “After consulting the services of the Attorney General, it is my understanding that I am under no requirement to comply.”

 Your letter suggests you may have initiated the process by which the Texas Attorney General issues Open Records Decisions (ORD).  If that is the case please provide us with appropriate notice as required by §552.301(d) of the Texas Public Information Act (TPIA), as well as any opinion or finding the office of the Attorney General may have referred you to.

 If you did not commence the ORD process you may be in noncompliance with the TPIA and the information that we requested will be presumed public.  As it stands, there is an inherent presumption that the requested records are public.  These documents relate to your official status, and are in your possession regardless of where you may store them.  Therefore, under the provisions of the TPIA we are giving you ten days from receipt of this letter to provide us with the information we requested, or to provide us with appropriate notice of a request for an opinion.  If you fail to do so we will have no choice but to consider available legal means to obtain the public information that we requested.  Attached you will find a copy of your response from July.

Sincerely,

Andrew Wheat
Research Director
 
 

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