'Commercial Appeal' sues Memphis, alleges slow-walking records requests

From Lawrence Buser's story:

The newspaper asked a Chancery Court to order the city to change its internal policy for processing public records requests which, the suit says, is “unnecessarily complicated and involves excessive delays in fulfilling public records requests.”

The city policy does not allow a citizen to request a public record, other than a traffic report, directly from the relevant city office or department. Instead, a written request must be made to the city attorney’s office which forwards the records request to the appropriate department and which then sends the records to the city attorney’s office for review.