The Sitka Assembly, acting as a quasi-judicial body, unanimously denied a citizen’s appeal over a public records request at its meeting Tuesday night (8-25-26).
Austin Cranford submitted a records request to the city clerk’s office in June, asking for information on changes to the city’s public records request process online. The city launched a new portal in June to address a massive increase in requests over the past decade and make the process more efficient.
Cranford wants the city to provide legal justification for two additions to the requester’s form.
“The city’s digital portal requires every online requester to sign a certificate of non-litigation affiliation and runs the request through a set of automated narrowing prompts,” he told the assembly Tuesday. “The paper form does neither. So I ask the city to identify the ordinance, statute, opinion, directive, or memo behind those extra requirements on the digital side. I did not ask anyone to write me an essay. Only what rule or rules this is based on and who decided it? This is the whole appeal.”
In his appeal, Cranford said the city refused to search for, or respond to, his request for the “legal framework,” and did not confirm that the records don’t exist.
Municipal Attorney Rachel Jones said this portion of Cranford’s request did not ask for a public record — it was asking for legal analysis, which goes beyond the scope of a public records request.
“It would be like asking a librarian to review Lord of the Rings and assess if it was a good authorship decision to have Sam and Frodo have a bromance instead of having a romance or an enemy relationship,” she said. “You’d have to go through every page where the character development happened. You’d have to apply the narrative structure of heroic epics. You’d have to look at brotherly love and why that’s a good narrative choice or not, and then pull every page that shows why that was a justified or unjustified decision. That would be asking a librarian to conduct literary analysis, and it’s the same thing here.”
The assembly said they believed Jones made a clear argument and unanimously denied Cranford’s request in a 6-0 vote.
Cranford is a former Sitka Assembly candidate, and he’s fought several public records request denials before the assembly since 2024. He also sued the city in 2025, alleging censorship on the Sitka Police Department’s Facebook page. He’s the son of former police sergeant Gary Cranford, who sued the city several years ago and settled for over $300,000 out of court.
