Tennessee Coalition for Open Government honored four individuals at its Salute to Open Government Champions on Wednesday, Oct. 22, 2025, at Riverside Revival in Nashville. More than 130 people attended the gathering to celebrate the honorees and support TCOG in its mission to preserve, protect and improve citizen access to public information and open government in Tennessee. Honored were Ken Paulson, Dr. Dorothy Bowles, Marc Perrusquia and Phil Williams.
The Tennessee Court of Appeals in a ruling on Friday put much-needed limits around the so-called investigative exemption that has been used by the state to cloak otherwise public records. "We hold that public records created in the ordinary course of business, which are non-investigative in nature, and which are otherwise accessible by Tennessee citizens under the TPRA (Tennessee Public Records Act), do not subsequently become exempt from disclosure because of the initiation of a criminal investigation in which those records become relevant," the Court ruled in Scripps Media, Inc. v. Tennessee Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services. Williams requested travel, other ordinary public records from state News [...]
Several news organizations and the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government have filed an amicus brief in a case under appeal in which ordinary public records were swept into an investigative file and then deemed confidential. The case, Scripps Media, Inc., v. Tennessee Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services and TBI, arose after Nashville NewsChannel 5 investigative reporter Phil Williams requested travel records, phone logs and credit card purchase summaries from the two state agencies. The agencies denied the request, citing the law enforcement "investigation" exemption. The records, they explained, had been requested by the district attorney as part of an investigation into potential misuse of funds. NewsChannel 5 [...]
TBI Director David Rausch has announced that the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation will no longer shield from the public the outcomes of internal investigations into possible misconduct by its agents. TBI Director David Rausch Previously, if a member of the public complained about an agent's actions, the department would conduct an investigation, but claimed that those investigations were confidential under the public records law exemption that makes all TBI investigation documents confidential. "What I am doing is on our internal complaints that come from the public, we will make those an administrative investigation. And administrative investigations, when they are concluded, are open to public review," announced Rausch, who [...]
Another blow was dealt to public records access in Tennessee this month when NewsChannel 5 lost a case in Chancery Court in Davidson County related to a recent controversy involving former TBI Director Jason Locke. Nashville investigative reporter Phil Williams had requested travel records, phone logs and credit card purchase summaries, among other records, after allegations arose that Locke had been conducting an affair with another state official using public resources. Around the same time of the public records request, the Davidson County district attorney began an investigation into the allegations. Though Williams had made his request to the Tennessee Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services and to [...]
