The entrance to the Office of the Public Access Counselor’s Government Center South suite on Wednesday, May 28. Another agency, which previously occupied the now-vacant work areas within view of the door, relocated years ago. Photo by Leslie Bonilla Muñiz, Indiana Capital Chronicle.

By Leslie Bonilla Muñiz
Indiana Capital Chronicle

INDIANAPOLIS — Tippecanoe County resident Pamela Frazee just wants to know if her messages went through.

Phone calls to Indiana’s Office of the Public Access Counselor route directly to a voicemail box and aren’t returned. Emails — including allegations of public access law violations that the office weighs in on — go unacknowledged. No opinions from this year are online.

Frustrated Hoosiers report the office has gone mum after a leadership shake-up.

“It’s not been a good transition at all if you don’t even have people who can answer the phones,” said Frazee, who sought confirmation that her time-sensitive complaints were received.

Former PAC Luke Britt, who ran the office for about 12 years under previous Govs. Mike Pence and Eric Holcomb, announced plans to resign mid-February, WFYI reported. In late March, new Gov. Mike Braun named Indianapolis attorney Jennifer Ruby as the successor. The office has one other employee, Kyra Helming, listed in the state’s transparency portal.

Britt, the state’s longest-serving PAC, pointed to an “overwhelming” workload in a niche area of law.

“I don’t envy what she’s having to deal with right now at all,” he said. “It’s not my place to give her the benefit of the doubt. But I certainly do.”

Braun’s administration, meanwhile, pinned blame on him.

“When Gov. Braun’s public access counselor appointment began in March, she inherited dozens of cases from 2024 that were not finalized,” Governor’s Office spokesman Griffin Reid said. “With that backlog successfully addressed, she is focusing her efforts on the 2025 cases and the statutory responsibilities of the office. Gov. Braun is fully committed to transparency at all levels.”

The Capital Chronicle requested comment from Ruby Friday,  May 9 and in the last week of May, but didn’t receive a response from her. No one answered the office door when reporters showed up.

The PAC provides guidance on state public records and open meeting laws. The officeholder responds to informal inquiries on the laws, issues non-binding advisory opinions and educates officials and Hoosiers on their rights and responsibilities, according to the website.

The Indiana General Assembly created the office in 1999.

Keeping Up

For Frazee, who filed two formal complaints mid-May and hasn’t heard back, the “PAC clock is ticking.”

Formal complaints must be filed with the office within 30 days of either an agency’s denial of records access or notice of an improperly held meeting. A complaint is considered filed on the date it is received, according to the office’s public access law handbook. Once a complaint is accepted, the PAC notifies the alleged offending agency and gives it 20 business days to respond.

“Do I need to resend it? Did you assign it? Did you toss it?” Frazee worried.

She said a confirmation that a filing has been received — “always” sent during Britt’s tenure — would provide reassurance “that I have submitted the PAC complaint in a timely fashion, where I don’t have to worry about it being tossed.”

Keeping up with demand proved a challenge, per Britt.

The workload grew annually, “sometimes by an exponential amount.” And “volume-wise, it was even overwhelming for me at times, just trying to keep it all straight, be responsive,” he recalled.

He said “constituent relations” — responding to Hoosier queries — was his top priority and became most of his workday.

An influx of 50-100 calls and emails were coming in daily by the time he left, Britt estimated. He described a “benchmark” for getting messages answered within 24 business hours.

“If I had time, or I would take work home in the evenings, to actually write opinions,” he continued. Legislation that went into effect last July “de-emphasized opinions even more, so I would try to resolve those conflicts informally as much as I could.”

House Enrolled Act 1338 limited the PAC to using only the law’s “plain text” — despite statutory ambiguities — and official court orders in writing opinions. Also, the governor can now remove a PAC at any time, instead of “for cause.”

Britt still wrote opinions, though — and imposed a benchmark for them, too.

The goal was to have all of of the the previous year’s opinions done before the first quarter of the next year ended. By the time he left, Britt said, he’d distributed the 2024 opinions but hadn’t uploaded them online; he hadn’t started on this year’s complaints.

His longtime deputy or an administrative assistant would usually handle tasks like uploading opinions. Only half those written are uploaded, according to a formal complaint guide. But both left partway through 2024, as the term-limited Holcomb administration neared end. Britt said that’s when the office fell behind on uploads.

He ran the agency solo for nearly a year. Then he resigned.

“I was worried when I left that there would be a lot of loose ends,” Britt said. “There was a lot of work in progress. There always was. No matter when I left, I knew … I couldn’t even begin to wrap everything up with a bow. I did what I could and tried to leave behind as many breadcrumbs as I could, but there was just too much.”

He estimated leaving behind 11 pending complaints and recalled Ruby mentioning the backlog had grown to about 40.