Tipsheet

The State of Wisconsin Has Strong Open Records Laws, but Government Has a Transparency Problem

Amy Curtis
Amy Curtis  |  July 14, 2026 2:45 PM

The state of Wisconsin has one of America's strongest open records laws. Under that law, broadly speaking, any person has the right to inspect and copy virtually all records created or kept by state and local government bodies. Records are presumed to be open to the public unless specific statutory or common-law exemptions apply.

Despite that robust law, it seems the Wisconsin government has a transparency problem. The Dairyland Sentinel has done some tremendous work on exposing how governments thwart Wisconsin's open records laws.

Here's more:

In January 2025, Dairyland Sentinel requested records from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction related to its June 2024 Forward Exam standard-setting workshop at Chula Vista Resort in Wisconsin Dells.

We expected records.

Instead, we found a much bigger story. It took more than a year, and it still isn’t over. Along the way, the records revealed spending, contracts, and internal practices that had never been publicly examined.

It inspired us to dig deeper and take a broader look at government transparency in Wisconsin. Over the next four months, Dairyland Sentinel reviewed press accounts, court opinions, appellate decisions, lawsuits, settlements, agency correspondence, public records and documented disputes involving Wisconsin state government dating back to late 2021.

The deeper we dug, the more familiar the stories became. None of these cases is new. What is new is seeing them together.

Different agency. Different requester. Different issue. Yet, the same roadblocks kept showing up.

Some requests sat for months, others for more than a year.

Some produced five-figure cost estimates, others ended in court before records were released.

Still others reshaped Wisconsin law through appellate decisions or settlements that forced agencies to change how they handle records requests.

Fraley's thread continues to lay out the problems.

And it's not just conservative outlets or individuals who face stonewalling.

Fraley says the investigation found recurring themes including delays, high production costs, disputes about disclosure, and a growing reliance on litigation, among other issues.

The entire thing began with the Department of Public Instruction (DPI), and it's nearly $400,000 in spending on a Forward Exam standards workshop.

"Those records ultimately documented at least $368,885 in taxpayer spending at the Forward Exam standards workshop and revealed participants signed nondisclosure agreements," Fraley wrote.

"The question is whether obtaining public records in Wisconsin increasingly requires months of waiting, thousands of dollars or litigation before government fulfills obligations already imposed by law," Fraley added. "We didn’t set out to prove Wisconsin’s open records law was broken. We spent four months digging through court cases, news reports and public records to see whether the law’s reputation matched reality. What we found surprised us."

Knowing full well most people don't have the time or the financial resources to sue.

Evers is refusing to share voter data and SNAP information with the Trump administration. That's a giant red flag for covering things up and, as we've seen in places like California — where the Newsom administration is hiding its free diaper contract from the media — it's the tactic politicians employ when they don't want the public to know what they're doing.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant.