03/18/2026
By Katherine Revello, Inside Investigator
A recently introduced piece of legislation would expand Connecticut’s vexatious requester statute, which allows public agencies to petition the Freedom of Information Commission (FOIC) to temporarily ignore Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from “nuisance” requesters. The bill would expand the grounds on which a requester could be found to be a nuisance to include threatening or harassing conduct, even if it was not related to a request.
Connecticut is one of a handful of states where government officials can be allowed to temporarily ignore nuisance requests from people who use FOIA requests not primarily to obtain information but to harass public officials. So-called vexatious requesters often file large numbers of requests, often filed within a short period of time and each seeking numerous lists of similar records, and repeatedly contact public officials about the status of those requests.
As the law currently stands, any public agency official who feels an individual is using FOIA to harass them can file a petition with the FOIC asking for the ability to not comply with requests from that individual for up to one year. A finding that a requester is vexatious is based on the number of requests filed and pending, their scope, the language of the requests and of communication about them, and “a pattern of conduct that amounts to an abuse of the right to access information under the Freedom of Information Act or an interference with the operation of the agency.”
The FOIC votes on whether petitions meet the burden of proving a requester is vexatious and justify restricting FOI rights. In the first case before them, the FOIC adopted definitions related to several of the laws provisions, including Merriam-Webster’s dictionary definition of vexatious and a pattern of abusive conduct. Those definitions created precedent that guides how the FOIC rules in vexatious requester cases.
SB 466 proposes expanding the types of conduct the FOIC could consider in determining whether a requester should be labelled vexatious. It expands the existing language in statute that allows the “nature, content, language or subject matter of other oral and written” communications to be considered to include “threatening or harassing conduct that took place at or outside of the agency’s office regardless of whether such conduct was related to the request.”