They asked who my lawyer was. Five times.
I tried to make a simple complaint to the City of Brookhaven, the kind a five minute call would have handled. Instead of help, I was asked more than five times who my attorney was, and then billed thousands for the records I asked for.
I asked the City of Brookhaven for help, and then for records. Here is what came back, in its own words and its own numbers.
When I asked the City Manager for a five minute call, he declined “any meetings” and cited “potential litigation.”
The Five Minute Call That Never Happened
I first tried to call the City of Brookhaven and email a simple complaint, the kind a five minute call would have handled. Instead I was asked, more than five times, who my attorney was. It was baffling, and indicative of their posture from the start. A disabled dad with a simple complaint on one side. The City’s contract attorney on the other. When they refused to speak to me, the only options the City left me were a complaint to the State Bar and a request under the Georgia Open Records Act.
The Open Records Bill
I filed under the Georgia Open Records Act. The City priced a single request at $49,385 and ran its demands up to $58,603.85. In one afternoon it closed a majority of my requests in under twenty minutes, even ones I had already paid for. Its own police department answers the public in about 1.3 days. Mine averaged 60. I paid hundreds of dollars and got almost nothing. My requests for an explanation went ghosted.
One of those records was not academic. I needed it for a rebuttal to the State Bar of Georgia, on a deadline. The City would not release it. I obtained it another way and filed on time, and that is the only reason the State Bar record exists in the form it does.
What Georgia cities may charge for records . When a request is priced out of reach
The ADA Route Pointed at Someone Who Had Left
I am correcting this section a second time, and this correction restores what I said originally. An earlier version of this page said the City had no ADA coordinator. I then removed that claim, because archived captures showed the City publishing a named coordinator going back to 2020. Removing it was the wrong call. It looked at the page and never asked the only question that mattered, which is whether the person named on it still worked there.
Internet Archive captures show the City of Brookhaven publishing a Title II notice, a written ADA grievance procedure, and a named ADA Coordinator with a mailing address and a phone number, on every capture read from October 17, 2020 forward. The procedure sets the City’s own deadlines: a meeting within 15 calendar days, a written response within 15 days of that meeting, and an appeal to the City Manager.
The coordinator named on that page was Lillian Young, who was also the City’s Human Resources Director. She left the City on December 5, 2025. Her own departure email, which the City produced to me under an open records request, gives the date in her own words: “My last day will be this Friday, December 5th.”
On February 24, 2026, City Manager Christian Sigman wrote to me that she was “no longer with the City of Brookhaven as HR Director.”
The City’s Title II page went on naming her as its ADA Coordinator, and went on telling residents with disabilities to send their complaints to her, through at least March 10, 2026. That is ninety five days after her last day, and fourteen days after the City Manager put her departure in writing.
So the published route was real, and the deadlines printed on it are the City’s own numbers. It pointed at somebody who was gone. Those deadlines are still the better fact, because a number can be measured. What my complaint and my open records requests actually produced is on this page. I went to the City’s insurer next.
Whether anyone at the City pointed me to that grievance procedure at the time is a question I am still answering from the written record. When I have the answer it goes here, whichever way it cuts.
The Police Department Record
Several events and documents in this record involved Brookhaven Police Department conduct, communication, or reporting. That part of the record has its own page, focused on access, communication, and records handling.
What Should Have Happened
None of what follows is exotic, and none of it costs a city anything meaningful.
- A five minute phone call, when a resident asks for one about a simple complaint.
- An answer to a complaint that does not begin by asking who your lawyer is.
- An itemised open records estimate, so a price can be understood and questioned.
- A written reason when a request is closed.
- An answer, of any kind, when a resident asks why.
Every word and number here is theirs. See how the other institutions answered.
Georgia InstitutionsState Bar of GeorgiaGIRMA, GMA, and Gallagher BassettSee the Proof