Records held by private contractors working for the government are available to the public under a public record law, the Georgia Supreme Court has ruled.
Ryan Milliron, who brought the suit, requested records from Manos Antonakakis, an associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, related to the work Antonakakis performed for the public university and the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency as a private contractor. Antonakakis declined to provide records, arguing the Open Records Act does not apply to him and that Georgia Tech was responsible for providing the records to Milliron.
A Georgia judge threw out the case in 2022, finding that the act only covers agencies, not individual employees. The Georgia Court of Appeals upheld the ruling in favor of Antonakakis.
Both of those decisions were wrong, Georgia’s top court said in the new opinion, which was handed down on Aug. 13.
The act states that, apart from a few exceptions, that “all public records shall be open for personal inspection and copying” upon request, including “all documents, papers, letters, maps, books, tapes, photographs, computer based or generated information, data, data fields, or similar material prepared and maintained or received by an agency or by a private person or entity in the performance of a service or function for or on behalf of an agency or when such documents have been transferred to a private person or entity by an agency for storage or future governmental use.”
“As the plain language of the statute makes clear,” LaGrua said, “records prepared or maintained by a private contractor ‘in the performance of a service or function for or on behalf of an agency’ are ‘public records’ under the act, and this is so even if the private contractor separately works as an employee of an agency.”
Additionally, requests under the law can be made directly to individuals, not just to custodians of records, the Georgia Supreme Court said.
The decision reversed the Court of Appeals ruling and directed the case back to that court with instructions to remand to the trial court with further proceedings consistent with the new opinion.
Meredith Kincaid, a lawyer representing Milliron, said in a statement to news outlets, “The Supreme Court’s opinion thoughtfully reinforces and clarifies important principles underlying the Open Records Act.”
Antonakakis did not respond to a request for comment.
The Georgia First Amendment Foundation, which filed a brief in support of Milliron, said in a statement that the decision “is a victory for government transparency in our state.”
