Between April 2021 and February 2026, the small city of Sedalia paid a single law firm, Lauber Municipal Law, just shy of $2 million—nearly one invoice per business day, according to reporting by Genevieve Smith and Annie Goldman of the Columbia Missourian. Sedalia’s population is a little over 20,000. Out of its $35 million budget for fiscal year 2026, the city set aside $500,000 for legal fees.
Residents are asking why.
The answer, at least in part, is Missouri’s Sunshine Law. Smith and Goldman’s reporting found that Belle, another small Missouri town, has seen the once-free cost of producing public records rise sharply since it began contracting with Lauber. Alderwoman Rebecca Withouse has been pushing the town toward more openness on her own, trying to make records easier for residents to get without paying attorney fees. Nathan Nickolaus, an attorney at the firm, told the Missourian that an increasing volume of open records requests is part of what’s driving the cost, and that many small towns simply lack the staff to fulfill the requests without outsourcing the work. (The dramatic increase in the number of records requests in Sedalia has been driven in part by citizen opposition to real abuses of power over the last few years. More details are provided here and here.)
This is a real tension, and Missourians who care about open government should not wave it away. The Sunshine Law exists because taxpayers have a right to see what their government is doing, and that right shouldn’t depend on the size of the city. But when a town of 20,000 people is paying half a million dollars a year in legal fees, much of it tied to records requests, something in the system is broken. The law is functioning as intended—it’s the capacity to comply with it that’s failing.
Part of the problem is structural. Missouri’s smallest cities and towns often have no in-house attorney, no records clerk, and no dedicated compliance staff. When a Sunshine Law request arrives, towns often hire whatever legal help they can afford. Firms like Lauber have built a business model around exactly this gap. The arrangement isn’t necessarily predatory—someone has to do the work—but it does mean the cost of transparency in a small Missouri town scales with legal billing rates rather than with the actual complexity of the records involved.
The Show-Me Institute has documented this problem before, and the numbers get worse than Sedalia’s. In 2018, Institute researchers sent Sunshine Law requests to cities across the state asking for basic spending records. Battlefield billed $35,000 and Hollister billed $25,000 for records that Springfield, a far larger city, and Strafford, a far smaller one, handed over for free. The ability to produce a checkbook register has nothing to do with city size. It has to do with whether a city’s leadership wants residents to see how their money is spent. Missouri courts have recognized how far this can go—Rudi Keller wrote for the Columbia Daily Tribune in 2019 that a Boone County judge ruled that the University of Missouri’s demand for more than $82,000 to fulfill a records request amounted to a de facto denial, not a fee.
Small, struggling towns deserve some benefit of the doubt. Maybe they are simply receiving more requests as residents want more visibility into local government. A town that has historically operated with little scrutiny may find that its first real exposure to the Sunshine Law is uncomfortable. But there’s a difference between a town facing legitimate scrutiny and a town being structurally unable to respond without hiring outside counsel for routine requests.
If the goal is government transparency rather than legal billables, Missouri lawmakers and municipal associations have better tools available. The Missouri Municipal League could develop shared records-request templates and training so small towns aren’t paying attorney rates to answer routine questions. The legislature could examine whether some categories of Sunshine Law compliance could be standardized in ways that reduce the volume of one-off requests requiring individual legal review. And towns themselves should be asking whether a records clerk, even a part-time one, would cost less over a year than the current pattern of per-request legal bills.
Missourians should take seriously the problem that small towns are struggling to comply with the burdens of being open. The current model of outsourcing routine compliance to law firms billing by the hour is an expensive way to deliver necessary transparency. Sedalia’s residents are right to ask where the money is going, as are the taxpayers of a town paying outside counsel to handle a request that should take a few hours.
Missouri’s small towns didn’t create the Sunshine Law’s compliance burden, and taxpayers shouldn’t need to fund a cottage legal industry just to see what their government is doing.
