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ST. LOUIS — Michelle Pona had a question about city government.

It was earlier this fall and Pona, who lives with her husband in the Southwest Garden neighborhood, had been following the debate in the Board of Aldermen about regulating short-term rentals. Pona’s life has been disrupted by raucous parties at homes used for Airbnb rentals. She didn’t think the proposed regulations, which included a ban on single-night stays and a new permitting system, went far enough.

She wanted to know how folks in the short-term rental industry were influencing the debate behind the scenes. So she filed a Sunshine Law request. Pona asked for emails about the proposed regulations between the office of Mayor Tishaura O. Jones and the bill’s sponsor, Alderman Bret Narayan.

The response to her request was bewildering.

Yes, the city said, there are hundreds of emails responsive to the request. But, the city also said, you cannot see them unless you pay more than $4,500 to convert the emails into a different format.

The city stores its emails in a standard database format. But it has a practice of converting those emails into printable PDF files before the city counselor’s office or somebody else examines them to make sure they don’t need to be redacted. Apparently, the city isn’t very good at making computer conversions.

“It really makes zero sense,� says David Roland.

He’s the executive director of the and one of the experts on the state’s open meetings and open records law, known as the Sunshine Law. On Tuesday, he filed a suit against the city on Pona’s behalf alleging multiple violations of that law.

The case is egregious, Roland said, because after the city told Pona her request would cost thousands of dollars, she altered it. She asked for the files in their “native format,� as the law allows. Because the city had already identified the emails responsive to her request, she offered to pay the cost of the initial search — about $26.

The city still said no.

It’s not the first time that’s happened. Local attorney Elad Gross, who has an ongoing open records lawsuit against the city, encountered a similar issue when he was seeking jail records related to his client.

Unfortunately, Roland says, this is a pattern in many government bodies — delaying the release of public records by charging outrageous and illegal fees, or by coming up with some type of technological hurdle.

“By delaying the production of these records, the citizens will have missed their opportunity to share this crucial information at a time when it could inform the policy debate in the city,� Roland says. “The timely production of records is important so that citizens may play their proper role in influencing debate.�

Indeed, that’s what happened in Pona’s case. The two bills she was following were signed into law by Jones in early November. By the time Pona gets the records, they will have zero impact in helping citizens know what’s going on in their government.

That’s increasingly a problem in Missouri, whether in a city run by Democratic politicians or in the state government run mostly by Republicans. Take the office of Attorney General Andrew Bailey, who is supposed to enforce the Sunshine Law.

His office is so backed up that even requests for simple things, like his calendar, take several months to a year to yield a result. That renders the Sunshine Law virtually useless, which is just fine in the minds of some politicians.

Roland hopes Pona’s case continues a trend of courts reining in the bad government actors mucking up transparency in Missouri.

“Our hope is that this case can help establish solid precedent confirming the right of citizens to swiftly obtain public records in their native electronic format,� Roland says. “There’s no justification whatsoever to not just copy those files onto a disk and provide them.�