Let me tell you something about putting.
Back in Atlanta, there’s a place called Bobby Jones Golf Course at Chastain Park. Legendary layout. And if you wanted to get good at putting — genuinely good, not YouTube-tutorial good — you went there and you put in the hours. Repetition. Muscle memory. Putt after putt after putt, not because a tournament was on the line, but because when the tournament moment finally arrived, you wanted the mechanics already built into your hands.
That’s how I approach public records requests.
I’m not a lawyer billing hours. I’m not an activist wielding an axe. I’m a practitioner — and like any craft, public records work requires repetition, discipline, and a willingness to do the work even when there’s no headline waiting at the end.
It’s about muscle memory, and that’s developed at the City Clerk’s counter, not in the comment’s section of your local social media outpost.
The Chalker Precedent
Public records work has consequences. Not always the ones you expect.
Brad Chalker was a community service aide for Coconut Creek. He was also the campaign manager for Steve Gonot — who, after I spent considerable time and energy exposing his conduct, eventually found himself spending 365 days in a Broward County jail cell.
During that period, Chalker thought it would be clever to access my personal records and my mother’s records through Florida’s crime database, the DAVID system. Then he talked about it. Publicly.
So, I filed a single complaint with the City of Coconut Creek.
What happened next is the part people never expect. Chalker wasn’t just fired for the records pull — he was fired because the complaint opened a door, and once that door was open, nobody could close it. Things came out. Unrelated things. Things that had been sitting quietly in the dark, waiting for someone to go looking.
Nobody was going looking until I filed that complaint.
That’s the lesson I carry into every public records request I file today. You’re not always looking for what you find. But you file anyway, you follow the process, and you let the documents tell the story. Sometimes the story surprises everyone — including you.
Also, I chased the Chief of Police out of town, over that way. I am, some might say, not without certain talents.
The FOI Playbook: Process Beats Protest
The methodology behind this work is documented in REVOLT Training’s FOI Request Engineering Playbook — and the core principle is simple enough to tattoo on your wrist: process beats protest.
Public records laws are not a courtesy. They are a control surface. When used precisely, they expose how power actually operates — who decides, under what authority, and whether the rules on paper match the behavior in practice.
The Playbook opens with this framing because it’s the most important thing to understand about why public records work succeeds or fails. Outrage gets you on TV. Process gets you documents. Documents get you leverage. Leverage gets you change.
The methods in the Playbook are not theoretical. They are drawn from decades of applied use — against local governments, state agencies, and institutional actors who assumed nobody was paying close enough attention to follow the paper trail.
They were wrong.
The Stevens Method: Applied FOI Pressure Engineering
Here’s how the methodology actually works, broken down into its core rules.
Rule 1: Start with the decision, not the document. Every effective FOI request begins with a decision node — a specific moment where public authority was exercised. What decision was made? Who had authority to make it? What policy, ordinance, or statute governed it? If you cannot identify the decision, you cannot engineer a meaningful request. No decision = no leverage.
Rule 2: Infer the mandatory paper trail. Lawful decisions generate records. Always. Before drafting, complete this sentence: “If this decision was made lawfully, the following records must exist…” Your job is not to guess what they have. Your job is to identify what they must have.
Rule 3: Use “records sufficient to show” language. Avoid broad fishing requests — they invite delay and evasion. A constraint-based request is surgical. It names the specific records, the specific timeframe, and the specific identifiers that make it impossible to pretend the documents don’t exist. “Records sufficient to show” language does two things: it forces production of decision-critical records, and it makes “no records” a substantive admission rather than a dodge.
Rule 4: Tie every request to a process step. Each item in your request should map to a distinct step in the decision-making process — eligibility determination, staff review, final approval, exceptions or deviations from policy. If a step exists, a record exists. If they can’t produce it, the process failed.
Rule 5: Anticipate the response before you file. Every agency response falls into one of four categories: production, no records, delay, or over-redaction. Each is diagnostic. Fee demands, delay tactics, and “burdensome” objections are not neutral responses — they are indicators of discretionary stress. Document them. They often reveal more about process fragility than the records themselves.
Rule 6: FOI is a pressure tool, not a one-off. Single requests educate. Structured requests force change. Well-engineered FOI boxes agencies into consistent explanations, makes selective enforcement visible, and builds an evidentiary record without discovery. As the Playbook puts it: this is not activism. It’s systems debugging.
The final principle cuts through everything else: don’t ask “what records do you have?” Ask “what records must exist if you followed your own rules?” That question is where FOI stops being passive and starts being dangerous — legally, ethically, and institutionally.
Why Pompano Beach
I recently filed Chapter 119 Public Records Requests targeting compensation records and communications in Pompano Beach. Not because I have a specific allegation. Not because I’m sharpening an axe.
Because I’m on the putting green.
The Playbook includes a full case study on Pompano Beach — a selective enforcement test involving invocation speakers at commission meetings — that illustrates exactly what happens when you file a decision-node-anchored request against a city that has been operating on informal norms rather than written rules. The city maintained a written policy. The city had a written exception process. When asked to produce the records that must exist if that exception process was followed, they couldn’t. Because it never happened. A city official instead explained approval via “active presence” — a phrase that appears nowhere in the policy. Invented after the fact.
That’s what the paper trail reveals when you know how to read it.
Every PRR I file teaches me something — about how a particular agency responds, how they structure their records, where the gaps are, and how long they take. That’s institutional knowledge that only comes from repetition. It’s the Bobby Jones hours. It’s the muscle memory you want already built before the tournament moment arrives.
What This Means for Municipal Florida
Florida still has (thought weakened substantially in the past decade) has some of the strongest public records laws in the country. Chapter 119 is a powerful instrument — and under Florida law, agencies must produce records within a reasonable time. But like any instrument, it rewards the people who practice it seriously.
The FOI Request Engineering Playbook is not a guide for casual seekers. It is, as it says directly, “for the systems debugger.” It replaces outrage and theatrics with disciplined, repeatable engineering. It is a sophisticated evolution of open-government advocacy that turns the government’s own bureaucracy against its worst instincts.
Most people who engage with public records work fall into one of two categories: lawyers billing hours or activists with a specific target. I’m neither. REVOLT Insights (revolt.training) exists in a different lane entirely — disciplined methodology, repeatable process, and the kind of institutional knowledge that only comes from putting in the reps.
When the tournament moment arrives for your municipality — and it will — you want someone who’s already been on the putting green.
Chaz Stevens is a civic activist, municipal governance consultant, and IMLA CLE Faculty member based in Deerfield Beach, Florida. He runs REVOLT Insights (revolt.training). He is not an attorney. The FOI Request Engineering Playbook is available at revolt.training. PRR documents referenced in this post will be published in full upon receipt.
