Transparency project aims to help Montanans navigate their right to know

A group of law students and activists hopes to educate the public and help everyday people with public records requests.

A group of Montana law students and young activists launched an organization this week to help facilitate freedom-of-information requests and to educate both the public and policymakers on the state Constitution’s right to know.

The founders of the Montana Transparency Project, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, say they want to complement the state’s existing landscape of FOI resources — namely, attorneys — by helping everyday Montanans with the initial steps of requesting public information from their government.

“We realized that it can be really hard to know what’s the best way to do this, what’s the timeline, will it cost money, what questions to ask,” said Jacob Linfesty, the organization’s president and a Harvard Law School student originally from Billings. “If you’re an average Montanan, if you don’t have connections, a lawyer, these questions are hard to answer.”

The idea for the project hatched when Linfesty was working with the group’s now-secretary, Claremont McKenna College senior Caroline Bullock, and now-treasurer, University of Wisconsin law student Lydia Dal Nogare, at the Helena non-profit public interest law firm Upper Seven last summer. The trio, working as non-attorney associates, assisted in some First Amendment and freedom-of-information cases, Linfesty said, and saw some of the challenges that people can face when requesting even the most basic public information.

“A lot of Montanas don’t know they even have a right to know,” Linfesty said.

Soon, the nascent group grew to include two additional University of Montana law students, now-vice president Lauren Halverson and now-communications chair Addie Slanger. Even outside of Upper Seven, an influential law firm that often files constitutional challenges against the state, the group has some notable connections in Montana’s political sphere: Caroline Bullock is the daughter of former Democratic Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, and Addie Slanger is the daughter of attorney Sean Slanger, a lobbyist whose clients have included the State Bar of Montana.

Linfesty said Thursday the group’s work will be non-partisan, though not necessarily non-political. The Montana Transparency Project’s website features a page-long non-partisanship policy, which states the group “will not assist candidates, campaigns, ballot measure campaigns, political parties, independent committees … or any other group organized exclusively or primarily for political purposes … with information requests.”

The group may make some of its own requests, the policy states, if the release of the relevant information would foster the public’s confidence in political institutions, allow for the examination of public expenditures, maintain accountability for officials, prevent secret government conduct, and support the right to know and “the other rights enshrined in the … Constitution.”

A form on the project’s website allows those seeking assistance to generally describe the information they’re looking for and what kind of help they need. From there, Linfesty and his colleagues would help them format, refine and target their request to receive the best result possible in the least amount of time.

This would be a help for not just members of the public but also public information officers, who sometimes receive requests that for various reasons are not “administrable,” Linfesty said.

“We’ve had a lot of conversations with [public information officers], and one issue that’s important is the administration of the right to know for Montanas to make a request,” Linfesty said. “PIOs often get requests that are hard to understand what they’re looking for, or it yields 10,000 pages as a response, which isn’t helpful to the requestor.”

On the flip side, he said, it’s also important to educate government officials about their obligations under the law.

As nobody in the group — for now, at least — is licensed to practice law, the project will not (and, legally, cannot) offer legal advice. That sets it apart from the Montana Freedom of Information Hotline, which is connected to attorney Mike Meloy, or from non-profit firms like Upper Seven.

Linfesty said the organization’s primary focus will be on “step one of the information process,” while the hotline generally works with people further along the way.

“The Montana Transparency Project will complement the free services the Montana Freedom of Information Hotline provides through Right to Know specialist Peter ‘Mike’ Meloy, a veteran Helena attorney,” the hotline’s chairwoman, Choteau Acantha editor Melody Martinsen, said in a press release announcing the transparency project’s launch. “MTP will provide another option for citizens, particularly, to receive free, non-attorney assistance in filing requests for public documents, which can be confusing and frustrating for people new to the process.”

Linfesty said that the money for the project’s startup costs came from the founding quintet’s pockets, but they’ll be soliciting grants and donations in the future.

“It’s not funded by any outside interest. It’s funded by our own interest in securing the promise of the Montana Constitution,” he said.