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InvestigateWest’s Daniel Walters honored with Washington open-government award
Bunting Award recognizes “Broken Records,” a series that tested the responsiveness of Northwest cities to public records requests
City records officers say the rising number – and increasing complexity – of records requests has contributed to massive delays in providing them. (Daniel Walters/InvestigateWest)
InvestigateWest reporter Daniel Walters has been honored with the Kenneth F. Bunting Award by the Washington Coalition for Open Government, in recognition for a series of stories examining the responsiveness of local governments to public records requests.
Daniel Walters covers democracy and extremism for InvestigateWest through a partnership with Report for America.
WashCOG also gave the James Andersen Award to Robert McClure, an investigative journalist and co-founder of InvestigateWest, for his efforts to make the organization “more visible, more effective and better connected in Olympia.”
Walters will receive the award Friday at WashCOG’s annual Sunshine Breakfast in Bellevue, Washington. The honor is given annually for work that relies upon or advances the use of Washington’s open-records laws.
Walters was honored for his work on the “Broken Records” series, which tested the responsiveness to public records requests of 15 cities across the Pacific Northwest. Though there was great variety among the responses, Walters found that citizens are waiting longer and longer to obtain records, as lawmakers add exemptions to the Public Records Act that burden records clerks and add to delays. Walters’ reporting led to changes at Spokane City Hall, which added a records staffer to attempt to improve its responsiveness.
Walters is a longtime Northwest journalist, who worked for the Pacific Northwest Inlander newspaper in Spokane before joining InvestigateWest in 2023. He covers democracy and extremism for InvestigateWest through a partnership with Report for America.
WashCOG is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization devoted to government transparency, and it honors journalists and others annually for advancing that cause. The Bunting Award is named for Ken Bunting, an executive editor and associate publisher of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer who helped found WashCOG in 2002. Bunting also served as executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition. He died in 2014.
McClure is a former investigative reporter at the Post-Intelligencer, and was one of the founders of InvestigateWest — a nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism in the Pacific Northwest. His most recent story for InvestigateWest, published in January, revealed flaws in Seattle’s tree-protection ordinance.
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