What was asked, and of whom Sixteen requests under the Oklahoma Open Records Act and one federal Freedom of Information Act request

Produced in full and free of charge: 111 pages, answering each of the six items of the request in turn. No copying fee, no search fee, no invoice, and no exemption claimed. The response states that no substantive responsive record was withheld and that redactions are limited to private contact details of current and former employees under 51 O.S. § 24A.7(D), meeting credentials and like material. It adds that if a responsive record is later found it will be produced promptly.

The production is one PDF: a response letter, four runs of correspondence, and a stack of attachments running from a 1995 water contract to a letter of intent drafted in June 2026. It is published as the twenty-four documents it is made of, so each can be read and cited on its own. The pages are split, never re-encoded, and the split is written only if the page ranges account for all 111 pages exactly, once each, against the file the town sent. The text-message pages were read first, as a received file is before it goes up here. They carry no telephone numbers and no addresses — the town had already redacted contact details under § 24A.7(D) — and the exchanges are between named town officials and the developer, so nothing needed to be held back.

the document as received → · all twenty-four documents, split and published →

Produced in full and free of charge: 307 pages in seventeen files — printouts from the executive assistant’s Outlook mailbox and the review committee’s own notices, agendas and minutes, running from 14 August 2025 to 1 September 2026. No copying fee, no search fee, no invoice and no exemption claimed. The production carries four dated versions of the Project Plan, one of them bearing the developer’s tracked comments, together with the draft Economic Development Agreement and the draft Tax Incentive Agreement — documents the county’s own productions had not supplied.

all thirty-one documents, split and published →

Sent by email to Michael Hull, the Records Custodian named in the library system’s Open Records Policy. That policy takes a request only by mail or in person, although the system publishes Mr. Hull’s email address, keeps an email list for its board agendas and takes questions through a form on its website.

The policy was approved on 25 March 2025, more than seven months before the project first appeared on a county agenda, and it applies to every requester, so it was not written for this request. It is recorded because a rule that makes a requester put a letter in the post to an office that answers email is part of how a request is handled. The same day, Kiamichi Technology Centers confirmed in writing that a request may be filed with it by email (letter 07).

the document as received →

Taken in person to the system’s headquarters at 2820 N. Main Street, McAlester — the address the policy gives for the Records Custodian — between 1:10 and 1:20 pm on a Friday. The doors were locked, and no one answered at 918-426-0456, the number the policy lists. The system’s website posts hours for each of its libraries and none for its headquarters.

51 O.S. § 24A.5(8) requires a public body to have at least one person available to release records at all times during its regular business hours. With no hours posted for the office where a request must be delivered, a requester cannot know when those are.

Sent by USPS Certified Mail with return receipt, through DocuPost, for $15.03: the letter of 18 September, unchanged. Tracking number 9214 8902 3589 0900 0044 7849 83. The system’s time is counted from the day USPS shows the letter delivered.

The postage is not a fee charged by the library system and is not counted in what the records have cost. It is recorded because it is what the mail-or-in-person rule cost this request, on top of the days in transit.

Produced in full and free of charge, fourteen days after the request: a shared folder of 186 files, 67 of them distinct — the executive director’s email, the committee handouts he kept, and four Board of Trustees packets — running from 18 November 2025 to 1 October 2026. No copying fee, no search fee, no invoice and no exemption claimed. The email was searched once per group of the request’s search terms and each group saved to its own folder, so the folder names are an account of the search, which no other body has given. The attachments came as the original Word and Excel files, as the request asked, with their authors, tracked changes and comments intact.

There is no cover letter. Every distinct file is published byte for byte; only the 30 September handout packet, four documents in one scan, is split, and its pages are extracted rather than re-encoded. Nothing is redacted, by the library system’s choice and not ours: personal addresses and mobile numbers, and an email its author headed “CONFIDENTIAL ATTORNEY WORK PRODUCT”, were released without any exemption being claimed, and a record a public body has released under the Act has been released. The folder names also show what was not searched as a separate term — Public Service Company of Oklahoma, Jonathan Wynn, “TID”, “TIF”, “abatement” and “data center” among them — and no text messages, calendar entries or notes were produced. Those are for a supplement, not a complaint: fourteen days, no charge and native files is the best answer any body has given this site.

all seventy documents, published as received →

Produced in full at the counter: 99 pages, the whole of what was asked for — twenty-three recorded instruments covering every Pittsburg County filing that names Emerald ProjectCo Inc. from 1 January 2025. Receipt No. 2026-00005547: $99.00 for copies and $5.00 to certify, $104.00 in all. Nothing was withheld, no exemption was claimed, and no search fee was charged.

28 O.S. § 32 sets the county clerk's fees by statute rather than by office policy: $1.00 a page for a copy (item 4) and a further $1.00 a page to certify one (item 7). Read strictly that would have been $99.00 plus $17.00 for the seventeen pages of the certified assignment chain — $116.00. The office charged $5.00, one dollar for each of the five certificates it issued rather than one for each page it certified, and so billed $12.00 less than the statute would have allowed. It is recorded because the same register notes a charge that went the other way, and a fee read in the requester's favour is as much a fact about how a request was handled as a fee that was not.

the document as received →

Paid at the counter by card. $104.00 to the county, plus $2.44 taken by Certified Payments, the county's card processor, as a convenience fee — $106.44 in all. The records were released on payment.

the document as received →

Read the same day, and the reading turned up a gap. The production is complete against the list handed over the counter — and the list was short. It was built from an index search on “Emerald ProjectCo Inc.” alone. The county’s index shows twenty instruments under “Black Mountain Energy” in this county: five are the assignments already copied, and fifteen were never ordered. The letter of 8 September asked for records naming either company, so all fifteen were within the request. The shortfall is the requester’s, not the office’s.

It is logged because this register is supposed to show how a request was handled, and that includes the part the requester got wrong. What the fifteen contain is not trivial: two oil and gas leases granted by the Commissioners of the Land Office of the State of Oklahoma over Sections 34 and 35 — state school land inside the site itself — a further oil and gas instrument from Spess Oil Company over Section 26, a mortgage and assignment to First Financial Bank covering 68 tracts in Sections 21, 22 and 28, and two warranty deeds by which Black Mountain bought land in Sections 15 and 28 in April 2026, outside the six sections the Project Plan covers and six months after it had assigned the site to Emerald ProjectCo. None of it is on this site yet, because none of it has been read.

The second order, filled at the counter: 107 pages, the fifteen instruments indexed under Black Mountain Energy Storage that the first list missed. Receipt No. 2026-00005552, $107.00 for copies at the statutory dollar a page. No certification, no search fee, nothing withheld. The page count matched the index exactly — every one of the fifteen, to the page.

The split was written from the county’s index before the scan arrived: each instrument’s book-and-page span gives an exact page count, and the fifteen tile to 107. So the production could be checked against a prediction rather than the joins being read off the scan and hoped over. All fifteen confirmed, page for page, against the recording stamp on every page.

the document as received →

Paid at the counter by card. $107.00 to the county, plus $2.51 taken by Certified Payments as a convenience fee — $109.51 in all.

the document as received →

Invoice No. 100 for $37.50, payable before any record is released: 70 pages of copying at $0.25, and $20.00 for 30 minutes of "search and process of records" at $10 per 15 minutes.

The copying charge is the ordinary one. The search charge is harder to place. KEDDO's own Open Records Act Policy says a fee for record search may be charged where a request "is solely for commercial purpose" or "would clearly cause excessive disruption of the essential functions of the public body" — and 51 O.S. § 24A.5 forbids a search fee where release is in the public interest, naming "taxpayers seeking to determine whether those entrusted with the affairs of the government are honestly, faithfully, and competently performing their duties." The request form filed with KEDDO was marked Public Interest, and the covering letter said in terms that it was not for a commercial purpose. The invoice is being paid rather than contested: $20 is not worth delaying the records over. It is recorded here because what a body charges, and on what basis, is part of how the request was handled.

the document as received →

Invoice No. 100 paid in full, $37.50. KEDDO releases records on receipt, under its own policy, and the production followed a week later.

Produced by post on payment: 70 pages, Outlook printouts from two mailboxes — the executive director’s and the projects director’s — running from 21 May 2025 to 19 November 2025. The page count matches Invoice No. 100 exactly. Nothing was withheld on the face of it and no exemption was claimed. The bundle carries no cover letter: no response letter, no account of what was searched, and no statement that any category of the request holds no responsive record. Nothing in the 70 pages is redacted.

It is published as the twenty-six documents it is made of, so each can be read and cited on its own, and the pages are extracted rather than re-encoded. The redactions are absent by KEDDO’s choice, not ours. The Town of Kiowa and Kiamichi Tech both covered contact details under 51 O.S. § 24A.7(D) before producing; KEDDO released everything — personal mobile numbers, personal yahoo and gmail accounts, and a handwritten sign-in sheet in the commissioners’ own hand. Nothing is covered here either. Every page is a public official or a company representative conducting public business, which is the test this site has applied throughout, and a record a public body has released under the Open Records Act has been released. Five of the 70 pages (41–45) are a second printing of pages 36–40 — the same email twice, on different sheets of paper — so $1.25 of the copying charge is for a duplicate. It is recorded for the same reason the county clerk’s $12 under-charge was: what a body bills, and on what basis, is a fact about how a request was handled.

the document as received → · all twenty-six documents, split and published →

Read the same day, and two gaps are on the face of it. The production stops on 19 November 2025, though the request ran from 1 January 2024 with no end date — so none of the nine months in which the committee met, both public hearings were held and the Board tabled the districts is in it. And of the five items asked for, two are answered and three are not: there is no prospect or site-selection file (item 2), no REAP, CDBG, EDA or ARPA application, feasibility study or funding request (item 3), and no confidentiality, exclusivity or non-disclosure agreement (item 5). Item 4 asked for reports to the District’s board; none appears.

With no cover letter there is nothing to say whether those categories hold no record or were not searched, and the difference matters: for a council of governments, grant and feasibility work is the ordinary business of the office. This is logged as a shortfall rather than a denial. KEDDO answered promptly, charged little, claimed no exemption and produced the two items it produced in full. A supplement letter naming the four categories and the 19 November cut-off is the next step, not an escalation under § 24A.17.