Located 30 miles north of Austin, officials at the city of Georgetown have repeatedly asked the Texas Attorney General’s Office to withhold data requested under the Public Information Act in 2025. A report has warned that more Texas governments seem to be “oriented toward a posture of secrecy.”
Texas Scorecard’s December request exempted the city’s police department after the city’s appeal to an earlier request in November. Among arguments from Senior Assistant City Attorney Lyndsay Lujan was that information that “would identify a victim of sexual harassment or assault” must be withheld.
On December 17, the city appealed a second request. In the appeal, Lujan pointed to multiple exceptions in state law, including the requirement that the email addresses of members of the public not be shared. However, this is an automatic requirement within Texas under the PIA.
She attempted to withhold additional information, writing that “insurance carrier selections” are “personal financial information not relating to a financial transaction between an individual and a governmental body.”
Lujan cited exemptions within the Texas Homeland Security Act. She wrote that some of the requested information “contains detailed descriptions of critical infrastructure systems” and that disclosure “could therefore compromise the safety and security of facilities essential to public health, safety, and continuity of government operations.”
Georgetown’s appeal to the attorney general is part of a larger trend in the state. “Governments today seem emboldened to obstruct, delay, and deny the release of public information through schemes of every sort,” James Quintero of the Texas Public Policy Foundation told Texas Scorecard. “Some threaten exorbitant charges to access data and documents. Others respond at a snail’s pace. Still others appeal excessively to state authorities, seeking to withhold what is rightfully ours.”
In a November 2024 report, Quintero and McKael Kirwin discovered the number of PIA request appeals the Office of the Attorney General received increased 54 percent from 2015 to 2023, rising from 31,660 to more than 48,000.
“This might signal that a greater number of governmental entities are seeking nondisclosure, the same number of governmental entities are seeking to withhold but on a more frequent basis, or some combination of the two,” they wrote. “Whichever the case, the public is contending with a system that appears oriented toward a posture of secrecy.”
To address this, Quintero and Kirwin recommended that state lawmakers remove exploitative exceptions to the PIA law, as well as amend and eliminate unreasonable exceptions. They also recommended rethinking exceptions governments are abusing, like attorney-client privilege, in order to hide information. Quintero reported lawmakers did not do this in 2025.
“The Texas Public Information Act needs a complete and total overhaul. The current iteration is wholly inadequate to ensuring that government remains the servant and not the master of the people,” Quintero said.
Responsibility for the operation of Georgetown is held by Mayor Josh Schroeder and the seven-member city council.
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