Request declined

I had my first records request declined, so I wanted to write about it.

I’ll start off by saying I was not surprised that my records request to the City of Phoenix was declined because I knew what I was requesting was not a public record, but in the off chance I was wrong I had to do it anyway.

After reading this great story in the Los Angeles Times where they put celebrities on blast for going over the limit on the amount of water they are allowed to use in California (their citizens seem to care very little about the drought… shocking I know) more than once, I attempted to put in a similar request to see if I provided addresses for prominent Phoenicians I’d be able to see how much water they use every month and compare that to the state average.

The LA Times was able to find out a different way than my approach, though, since it requested the letters celebrities like Kim Kardashian, Kevin Hart, Sylvester Stallone, Dwayne Wade and others received from the government about over-usage.

Reporters Hayley Smith and Sean Greene wrote:

The celebrities were among more than 2,000 customers who recently were issued “notices of exceedance” by the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District, indicating that they had surpassed 150% of their monthly water budgets at least four times since the agency declared a drought emergency at the end of last year.

Their properties are now subject to the installation of flow restrictor devices, which can reduce showers to a trickle and silence lawn sprinklers.

Arizona is not in that same situation as California, but water is a topic that really needs to be discussed more, even if it’s in the form of shaming people into caring more about their usage.

My plan was to request a handful of prominent Arizonans: elected officials, billionaires, athletes, etc, but it turns out most of them don’t actually live in Phoenix proper so I limited the request to two people running for governor. Kari Lake, the Republican, and Katie Hobbs the Democrat.

Pretty quickly a city water spokesman sent me this in response:

Only the account holder may request their utility bills or if they give approval to someone else doing that. Now, I did not ask Lake or Hobbs for their approval, but I also wouldn’t expect to get it either as this is a pretty unusual request and they are not required to provide the bills to me or anyone for that matter.

However, I am planning to ask them anyway for the sake of transparency. Water is a crucial issue in Arizona especially with recent news that Arizona is set to lose more than 20% of its water delivery next year.

I also sent a new request to the City of Phoenix to see if they keep track of water usage per zip code in the city and hope that they do because we will be able to know which areas use more water than others.

If that information is not being tracked, well then it should be and hopefully some new lawmakers will see this and get some ideas about bills for next session.

And if you’re an elected official or lobbyist or what have you and you want to share you water utility bill with me, I would be happy to heavily redact it besides the zip code, and usage details to help bring transparency to the issue.

Conservation is incredibly important and I would bet most people don’t actually know how much water they are consuming and where it stacks up.