$60,000 to See the Truth? A Fight to Shine Light on Georgia’s Digital Darkness

In this explo­sive episode of The Geor­gia Hour on Voice of Rur­al Amer­i­ca, host BKP sits down with Scott Howard, co-founder of MyOpenRecords.com and a Forsyth Coun­ty landown­er, to expose what may be one of the biggest gov­ern­ment-trans­paren­cy scan­dals brew­ing in Geor­gia.

The con­ver­sa­tion starts with a jaw-drop­ping rev­e­la­tion: Forsyth Coun­ty quot­ed Scott Howard near­ly $60,000 to ful­fill a seem­ing­ly rou­tine open-records request for serv­er audit logs, email meta­da­ta, and cell-phone records. Why the astro­nom­i­cal fee? Because those dig­i­tal “audit logs” would alleged­ly prove that a small, tight­ly-knit clique of res­i­dents — described as a “Mean Girls-style online social club” — has been secret­ly coor­di­nat­ing with coun­ty offi­cials through pri­vate Face­book groups, per­son­al emails, and texts to push con­tro­ver­sial zon­ing changes, strip prop­er­ty rights, and revoke grand­fa­thered sta­tus on pri­vate land.

Howard details how, since 2019, Forsyth Coun­ty seized com­mer­cial ease­ments on his family’s prop­er­ty with­out just com­pen­sa­tion — and still hasn’t paid a dime six years lat­er. When he and his team began dig­ging, they uncov­ered some­thing big­ger: coun­ty offi­cials appear to be delib­er­ate­ly hid­ing or offload­ing dig­i­tal records (emails, texts, large file trans­fers) to third-par­ty ven­dors like Microsoft, then claim­ing they can’t retrieve them with­out mas­sive “Lev­el 5 ven­dor” fees — a move Scott says direct­ly vio­lates Georgia’s Open Records Act and Sun­shine Laws.

Key bomb­shells from the episode:

• Coun­ty com­mis­sion­ers are using per­son­al emails and pri­vate groups to con­duct pub­lic busi­ness, instant­ly mak­ing those accounts sub­ject to open-records laws.
• Dai­ly auto­mat­ed open-records requests are now catch­ing com­mis­sion­ers in real time fail­ing to pre­serve or turn over text mes­sages.
• Geor­gia coun­ties and the Sec­re­tary of State’s office are stonewalling or end­less­ly delay­ing requests (one request has been ignored for 22 months).
• Howard’s team has already filed law­suits against Ful­ton Coun­ty DA Fani Willis, pend­ing lit­i­ga­tion in mul­ti­ple coun­ties, and turned evi­dence of non-com­pli­ance over to the Geor­gia Attor­ney Gen­er­al.
• A free pub­lic resource is com­ing: Scott promis­es to release a mas­ter spread­sheet of every Geor­gia county’s open-records cus­to­di­an con­tact info, plus bat­tle-test­ed tem­plates for cit­i­zens to file bul­let­proof requests with­out get­ting hit with crip­pling fees.

The duo explains how the dig­i­tal age has cre­at­ed new hid­ing places for gov­ern­ment offi­cials — Sig­nal chats, pri­vate Face­book groups, archived-but-inac­ces­si­ble servers — and why old-school “Sun­shine Laws” are being weaponized against the very cit­i­zens they were meant to pro­tect.

BKP and Scott Howard end with a ral­ly­ing cry: every Geor­gian has the absolute right to see what their elect­ed offi­cials are doing, whether it’s on a coun­ty-issued lap­top or a commissioner’s per­son­al cell phone. They urge lis­ten­ers to use MyOpenRecords.com tools, file strate­gic requests, and hold offi­cials account­able — because, as BKP puts it, “They’re not sup­posed to do busi­ness in the dark of night.”

A must-lis­ten for any­one who’s ever been told “we don’t have those records” or been quot­ed thou­sands of dol­lars just to see pub­lic infor­ma­tion. This episode is the blue­print for the next wave of cit­i­zen-led gov­ern­ment trans­paren­cy fights in Geor­gia and beyond.