Sunshine laws, which ensure anyone can request documents from governments, give the public and members of the media a glimpse into the inner workings of government — but that could come at a price. 

The Nevada Independent requested public records pricing policies from 17 municipalities in Southern Nevada. 

Rates varied, partially because Nevada’s public record law is up for broad interpretation. The law does state that agencies cannot charge more than it costs to maintain, print or provide the document a requester is asking for. However, the law does not mention the cost of paying someone, such as a public records officer, to procure a document — some agencies use this loophole to charge for the labor it may take to provide a public record.

What can add up quickly are what municipalities deem “research hours,” or the amount of time it takes for staff to find records. Many municipalities — including Henderson and the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department — did not explicitly list a specific amount charged per hour. Of the municipalities with specified research rates, North Las Vegas charges the most at $40 per hour of research. For Las Vegas, the first 10 hours of research are free, but the city charges $32 per hour after the 10th hour. 

Any member of the public can ask for public records — official documents held by the government but accessible by the public — under these sunshine laws. Although only about 2 percent of records requests come with a fee, those can be high. On average, a Nevada request that includes a fee costs roughly $3,573, according to the government transparency nonprofit and newsroom Muckrock. This is mild compared to Alabama’s whopping average of $12,287 per request but expensive when compared to Connecticut’s average of $157. 

In 2019, the Nevada Legislature passed SB287, which required governments to give an explanation if they cannot return the records after five days. Before SB287 was signed into law, governmental entities could theoretically take years to fulfill public records requests with no explanation, attorney Maggie McLetchie said in a 2019 hearing. However, requesters can sue if they feel an agency is not acting within “good faith” in providing records within a timely fashion. The bill also imposed fines if governmental entities willfully violated this act.

Still, experts say there are barriers to fulfilling requests. Patrick File, associate professor of media law at UNR, said agencies will often rely on high costs to dissuade requesters. Even if a requester is aware of their right to obtain records at a reasonable cost, it can be hard if the agency is noncompliant. 

“One of the chief shortcomings in Nevada is that it's a sort of ‘so sue me’ state,” File said. “If an agency is giving you the runaround, or making it difficult to obtain records, then your only recourse is to sue.” 

File said agencies in the more urban Southern Nevada often have more resources than rural agencies and can dedicate more time and manpower to finding government records — however, that does necessarily mean that records will be cheaper. The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD) has been singled out as an agency with expensive records requests. 

In 2020, LVMPD started charging $280 per hour for body camera footage — a move that brought scrutiny and criticism from civil rights groups and activists. Now, the police department charges $80 per hour for every hour spent to “research, redact, and prepare the video for release.” 

Others disagree with the notion that governments are deliberately putting public records out of reach. 

“Our [counties] tend to be supportive of those transparency efforts,” Vinson Guthreau, the executive director of Nevada Association of Counties (NACO), told The Indy. In 2019, NACO opposed SB287.

Because smaller counties often don’t have employees solely responsible for fulfilling public records requests, Guthreau said, employees tackle public records requests on top of daily responsibilities. Costs associated with public records are largely tied to staff time, he said, where staff could, for example, spend hours looking through historical records.

Avoiding litigation was central to AB128, a bill during the 2025 legislative session that originally sought to appoint a public records ombudsman to mediate disputes between media and government. The bill faced opposition from government representatives, including NACO, which argued that media organizations would be litigious anyways and that the power vested to the ombudsman was too much. Media representatives argued that an ombudsman appointed by the governor would be biased toward governments. 

The ombudsman idea was then amended out of the bill, and the final version that became law creates a task force of transparency advocates and government representatives tasked with studying and making recommendations about public records policies.

“Nevada, in general, has a pretty robust public records law. I think where we struggle is the definition of a public record,” Guthreau said in an interview, adding that governments lean toward protecting private information but some media organizations disagree on what should be private. That task force, Guthreau hopes, will be able to come up with a clear definition of a public record.