People vs Biloxi People vs Biloxi

The Records Wall

Mississippi gives a public body seven working days to produce a record, deny it in writing with the exemption named, or explain why it needs longer. Miss. Code Ann. § 25-61-5. Silence is not one of the three.

These are 25 requests, every one of them served. Not one has produced a record. On not one has the City served a written denial naming the exemption it relies on, as § 25-61-5(3) requires. On not one has it certified that the records do not exist. On the ten served in August it has not written at all.

Every clock below is live: the countdown, the sand and the verdict are all recomputed in your browser every second from the date the request was served, so no row can sit here calling itself current after its deadline has gone. Last rebuilt August 30, 2026. Nothing here is an accusation. It is a calendar.

The requests are addressed to the City’s records custodians

Stacy Thacker
Stacy ThackerCity Clerk
Catherine McMahanDeputy City Clerk
25requests served
0still on the clock
0on a claimed extension
25past the deadline

Deadlines exclude weekends. State holidays are not counted against the City, so every date shown is the earliest it can fall and never a later one. Every clock runs to the last second of its due date, Central time. The fifteen requests served July 30 and 31 carry a second date because the City wrote on August 5 that it needed “an additional seven business days.” Their clocks ran to the fourteenth working day after the request was received, which is both the seven days the statute allows plus the seven the City asked for, and the outer limit the statute permits in any event: production may be no later than “fourteen (14) working days from the receipt by the public body of the original request.” Miss. Code Ann. § 25-61-5(1)(b). An extension moves the date. It does not remove it. Every one of those extensions has now expired. Rows marked NO RESPONSE are the ten on which the City has never written in any form — verified August 30, 2026 against every message on all ten threads: outbound only, nothing back. Rows marked FEE DEMANDED, NO RECORDS are the fifteen answered on August 19 not with records but with a letter from the City’s outside litigation counsel, bundling the batch it counts itself as “(25 total),” estimating seventy-five hours, demanding $1,125.00 in advance at $15.00 an hour — three times the $5.00 research rate the City’s own Code fixes at § 2-9-6 — proposing a maximum of one hour a day for up to fifteen weeks, and offering to begin compiling only “upon receipt of your payment.”