Dallas Open Records: Requests, Timelines, and Appeals

You can file a Dallas open records request by sending a written description of the documents you want to the City of Dallas Open Records Center, either through the city’s online portal, by mail or hand delivery to the City Secretary’s Office, or by email. The Texas Public Information Act, in Chapter 552 of the Government Code, treats everything a city department collects or maintains as public unless a specific exemption applies, so the city has to justify withholding, not you.¹

How to Submit a Request

Section 552.221 of the Government Code requires only that your request be in writing and directed to the public information officer.² No specific form is required, though the Attorney General publishes a standardized form under Section 552.235 that many requesters find convenient.³

Dallas accepts requests through three channels:

The City of Dallas Open Records Center at dallastx.govqa.us. Setting up an account lets you submit requests, track status, exchange messages with staff, and pick up completed documents in one place.⁴
U.S. mail or hand delivery to the Open Records Center, c/o City Secretary’s Office, City Hall, 5th Floor, Suite 5DS, Dallas, Texas 75201.⁴
Email, which Section 552.234 recognizes as a valid delivery method.⁴

The city does not accept requests sent by fax. A request sent through an unapproved method will not be processed.

Writing a Request That Gets Results

How clearly you describe what you want is the single biggest factor in how fast the records show up. Vague requests invite follow-up questions and stop the clock. “All police records from 2025” could pull in tens of thousands of documents. “Incident reports filed at the Northeast Division between March 1 and March 31, 2025, involving vehicle thefts” gives the clerk a path straight to the files.

Name the department if you know it. If the records live with Public Works, the Department of Aviation, or the Police Department, say so. Add date ranges, names, addresses, case numbers, or contract identifiers that distinguish your target records from similar ones. Always leave a phone number or email so staff can call you to clarify rather than parking the request.

You can ask for records in electronic format. Under Section 552.228, the city must provide a copy in the electronic medium you request if it has the technology, does not need to buy new software or hardware, and would not violate a copyright agreement by doing so. If the city cannot produce records in the format you want, it must offer an alternative format acceptable to you.⁵ Electronic delivery often saves time and avoids per-page copying charges.

In practice, Dallas residents most often ask for City Council agendas, resolutions, and ordinances; police incident reports; the city budget and expenditure or audit reports; building permits, zoning applications, and inspection records; and contracts and bid files with city vendors. Any record a city department created, received, or stored as part of its work is a fair target.

What It Costs

Inspecting records in person at a city office is free. When you ask for copies, the city can charge for materials and labor at rates set in the Texas Administrative Code:

Paper copies at $0.10 per standard-size page.⁶
Labor at $15.00 per hour for staff time spent locating, compiling, and reproducing records, plus a 20% overhead charge on the labor cost.⁶

If the estimated total runs over $40, the city has to send you an itemized statement before it starts work. That estimate is your chance to narrow the request, approve the cost, or ask for only part of the material. A governmental body that skips the estimate cannot collect more than $40.⁷

If you only need to read the records, inspecting them at the city offices costs nothing, and you can pay to copy only the specific pages you want to take with you.

When You Should Hear Back

The Act requires the city to produce records promptly, meaning within a reasonable time without unnecessary delay.⁸ The 10-business-day mark is the key deadline. By the 10th business day after receiving your request, the city must do one of three things:

Release the records.
Notify you in writing that more time is needed and give a specific date and time when the records will be ready.
Request a ruling from the Attorney General if it believes some or all of the information is exempt, and send you written notice that it has done so.⁹

If the city asks for an Attorney General ruling, you will get a copy of the city’s written arguments and can submit your own comments explaining why the records should be released. The Attorney General then issues a decision, and the city must comply unless it files a lawsuit challenging the ruling.

Silence is not a legal option. If the 10-business-day window passes with no communication at all, the city has violated the Act.

What You Can and Can’t Get

Public information under the Act covers anything a governmental body collects, assembles, or maintains in connection with official business, in any format: paper, email, spreadsheets, databases, photographs, audio, video. The exemptions are specific and narrow. The ones that come up most often in city requests include:

Section 552.101, confidential information, a catch-all for records made confidential by the Texas Constitution, another statute, or a court decision. It also pulls in common-law privacy, which protects highly intimate or embarrassing facts whose disclosure would offend a reasonable person and are not of legitimate public concern.¹⁰
Section 552.102, personnel files, exempt where release would be a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy. The employee can always access their own file.¹⁰
Section 552.103, records tied to pending or reasonably anticipated civil or criminal litigation involving the city, exempt while the case is active.¹⁰
Section 552.104, bidding information whose release would give an advantage to a competitor or bidder.
Section 552.108, law enforcement records whose release would interfere with detection, investigation, or prosecution of crime, including internal affairs investigations that did not result in discipline.¹⁰
Section 552.130, Texas driver’s license, vehicle title, and registration data.
Section 552.137, a member of the public’s email address provided for communicating with a governmental body, unless the person consents.

When the city redacts or withholds, it has to tell you which exemption it is relying on. A blanket refusal with no cited exemption is not permitted. Partial redaction is also preferred: if only part of a document is exempt, the city should release the rest with the sensitive portions blacked out rather than withhold the whole file.

If the City Says No

Start by checking whether the city followed the procedure. To withhold records, it must request an Attorney General ruling within 10 business days and notify you in writing. If it simply refused without seeking that ruling, it has violated the Act and you can go to court.

If the Attorney General rules that the records must be released and the city still refuses, you can file a lawsuit for a writ of mandamus in a Dallas County district court to compel disclosure.¹¹ The Attorney General can also sue independently.

If you substantially prevail, the city must pay your litigation costs and reasonable attorney fees. The one exception is where the court finds the city acted in reasonable reliance on a court order, a published appellate opinion, or a written Attorney General decision.¹² That fee-shifting rule matters because a meritorious challenge does not have to come out of your pocket.

A Note on Federal Records

The Texas Public Information Act covers only state and local governmental bodies. For records from a federal agency with Dallas offices, such as the FBI, IRS, or Environmental Protection Agency, you need a separate request under the federal Freedom of Information Act, which has its own 20-business-day response window, its own nine exemptions, and its own fee structure. A Texas PIA request filed with a federal agency accomplishes nothing, and the reverse is also true. Federal requests start at the specific agency’s FOIA page or at foia.gov.

1
Texas Public Law. Texas Government Code Chapter 552 – Public Information
2
Justia Law. Texas Government Code Chapter 552 – Public Information
3
Office of the Attorney General. Public Information Request Form
4
City of Dallas. City of Dallas Open Records Center
5
State of Texas. Texas Government Code 552.228
6
Office of the Attorney General. Public Information Act Cost Rules 101
7
Legal Information Institute. 1 Texas Administrative Code 70.7 – Estimates and Waivers of Public Information Charges
8
Office of the Attorney General. Overview of the Public Information Act
9
Texas House of Representatives. Texas Public Information Act – Section: Information to Be Released
10
Office of the Attorney General. Public Information Act Handbook 2024
11
State of Texas. Texas Government Code 552.321
12
State of Texas. Texas Government Code 552.323