The Village by the Sea has been so inundated by public records requests this year that the city is hiring a temporary new staff member, according to Langley Mayor Scott Chaplin.

As of June 29, the city has received 50 requests during the year of 2023, compared to 57 in the entire year of 2022 and 36 during the whole year of 2021. One person alone has submitted a total of 16 requests this year.

The requests vary in scope, from records of aboveground and underground storage tanks in Langley, to comments from the Washington State Department of Transportation and Island County regarding the proposed housing development project on Coles Road, to a list of the individuals on the mayor’s task force who interviewed and discussed the city administrator candidates.

In addition, 21 requests have been submitted that were related to the police department.

Yet receiving requests is nothing new, and public records advocates have pointed out that there’s plenty of room for improvement for the public agencies fulfilling the requests.

William Crittenden, an attorney representing Eric Hood, a South Whidbey man who has filed a series of Public Records Act lawsuits against the city of Langley, argued that the city has never adapted to the internet era by learning to properly organize its records.

“Every time someone asks Langley for basic public records they act like it’s a big hassle because — if you have no policies, no record keeping, no rules about email or personal devices — it can be a big hassle,” Crittenden wrote in an email to The Record.

Chaplin told The Record that he is following the advice of the city’s attorney by hiring some temporary IT support to address a few of the items in Hood’s most recent request, submitted June 20.

“Without additional support our records specialist will not be able to keep up,” he said.

As part of that request, Hood is seeking records of emails exchanged between the city’s public records email address and his own personal account, stored in a variety of places.