There’s a new debate circling the wagon in the North Carolina General Assembly: where do text messages between public officials discussing public business fall within public records laws?

They are certainly considered public records, but how do agencies go about getting them to the one asking? What if the messages have been deleted? Who tracks them down, and what’s an appropriate amount of time spent to track them down?

“The work we do is the work of the public, and the work we do is owned by the public,” Attorney General Josh Stein said in an Associated Press report. “The public has a right of access to it because that’s transparency, that’s how you hold a government accountable. But we have to figure out how that works in a modern world.”

This situation isn’t one with a clear-cut answer of as now, but there’s one thing all can agree on: efficient ways to comply with such requests need to be discovered, and the statutes need to outline those efficient ways. Easier said than done.

There are ways to obtain old messages, albeit not very efficient. If the public official still has them on the cellphone, it’s relatively easy to copy and paste. In the case of deleted messages, some reporters have already gone the route of tracking the messages down through the recipients of them. The least efficient of the solutions is to ask a judge to subpoena these texts from the phone company.

These avenues are certainly not ideal, but until better ways are put in place, it is what it is. As with other types of public records, the burden lies with the agency to provide said records in a timely manner.

Agencies need to follow their duty to the public and work to produce these records. Text messages are a common way to communicate now, so these types of requests will likely increase. Until the logistics are worked out, it may be a time-consuming request, but it’s still very much a request to which the public has a right.