The growth of ORLs in the 1990s at least partially stems from the AG's attempt in 1995 and 1996 to overcome an opinions backlog that built up in the early 1990s. Prior to Jan. 1, 1996, the Act did not require the AG to issue open records opinions within a fixed number of days. As governmental requests for opinions rose in the early 1990s, the three to five attorneys who drafted open records opinions found themselves overwhelmed and unable to keep up, according to Coaxum.

"The workload kept increasing," says Coaxum. "The more Morales got out there or his staff got out there telling people about open records, the more the [open records] hotline became active [and] the more files started coming in-but there were no additional resources to handle those files. And so that's one of the reasons the backlog was built up." ³⁸

In 1995, the 74th Legislature addressed the delay by requiring the AG to render a decision "not later than the 60th working day" after receiving a governmental request for an open records ruling, with the option to take additional 20 working days if necessary. (The Legislature did not provide the AG with additional resources to help it meet the new deadlines, according to Coaxum.) In response, Morales moved open records issues out of the Opinions Committee and created the Open Records Division on Sept. 1, 1995, with Coaxum as its first chief. The division staff gradually grew to 12 (chief, deputy chief, and 10 drafting attorneys), but most of those attorneys did not come on board until after 1995.

The creation of the Open Records Division prompted "drastic changes to the internal process" of opinion writing, and the backlog became a focus of serious attention, according to Coaxum. While files received before January 1, 1996, were not subject to the new deadlines, Coaxum says she "didn't see a way that we could address the deadline issues as new files came in, and at the same time deal with all those files that were already here." As a result, "we made a concerted effort to get as many files out of here as we could before the January 1st deadline came in..So between September and December [1995], I was committed to at least trying to issue as many pending files as we could." Although staff size had not increased dramatically in the final quarter of 1995, the Open Records Division managed to take a significant bite out of the backlog. "Because we were a new division, we had the opportunity to stop and kind of start over," says Coaxum. ³⁹

These changes may account for a significant portion of the jump in the number of opinions issued in 1995. While the AG issued 901 open records letters in 1994-when there were fewer than five attorneys drafting letters-the agency released 1,634 opinions in 1995 and 2,477 in 1996. At no other time since 1988 has the number of opinions jumped so dramatically in consecutive years.

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