John Washburn: Sunshine Troublemaker of the Week

John Washburn of Germantown, Wisconsin is the very deserving recipient of this week’s coveted and increasingly prestigious Sunshine Troublemaker of the Week award.

John has won this award because as Austin, Texas KVUE television reporter and blogger Elise Hu describes in this wonderful post, Mr. Washburn, a resident of Wisconsin, sent an open records request to the office of Rick Perry, the GOP governor of Texas.

Mr. Washburn was inspired to do this after reading that Elise Hu is doing a series–called, appropriately, “The Purge”–about the fact that it is the policy of the Texas gubernatorial office to delete e-mails every seven days.

(Our regular readers know that it is a good time to be hot on the trail of whether governors are doing right by email.)

Although Mr. Washburn has yet to be publicly taken to task for his presumption! in filing an open records request–the normal qualification for winning the coveted STOTW award–I think it is clear from reading his forceful and eloquent rejoinders to the attempts of the Texas gubernatorial office to stonewall him that Mr. Washburn is, in fact, an STOTW in the proudest tradition of STOTWs everywhere.

I especially enjoyed this paragraph in his response to the Texas governor’s office:

On the matter of changing the request: I am not inclined to narrow this already very narrow request for your convenience. The request was specifically tailored to facilitate the identification and aggregation of the specified emails using tools commonly available to modern email servers and applications.

And his deft and appropriate reference to A Guide to Hiding Records.

We are more than pleased to acknowledge his excellent work.