A Washington Daily News investigation has found that public records aren’t always easy to obtain.

Of the public agencies the newspaper asked for public records, two complied almost immediately: the Beaufort County manager’s office and the Beaufort County Board of Education.

Two other entities, the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office and the Washington Police Department, either declined to comply with the newspaper’s public-records requests or said they didn’t have the information that was being sought.

The newspaper asked County Manager Paul Spruill for records of Beaufort County commissioners’ expenses for a trip to a National Association of Counties legislative conference.

Spruill provided this documentation via e-mail within a couple of hours.

The Daily News asked school-board spokeswoman Sarah Hodges for the annual salary of a high-school principal. Hodges returned a reporter’s phone call within half an hour, ensuring the salary amount was supplied in a timely fashion.

The newspaper sent a volunteer to the sheriff’s office to ask for the sheriff’s annual salary. Staff members at the sheriff’s office told the volunteer they didn’t know the sheriff’s salary, and they directed her to the county administrative building.

Another Daily News volunteer asked a police-department staff member if she could see all publicly available police reports for the week of March 7 through March 11.

This volunteer was told she could not see these reports, and that some portions of these reports were not public record. The volunteer also was asked to give the reason she sought the reports.

Under the North Carolina Public Records Law, law-enforcement personnel are allowed to redact parts of police or sheriff’s reports that aren’t public record. Personnel aren’t allowed to withhold public records without some compelling reason specified under the law.

Among the criminal-records information that is public are the time, date and location of a violation of the law and the name, sex, age, address, employment and alleged offense of a person charged, arrested or indicted.

In addition, arrest warrants are considered public records unless they’ve been sealed by a judge.

Also, people who request public records in this state aren’t required to give their names or the reasons they are seeking these records.

We understand that some public records take time to compile, and the law doesn’t require the government to create a record where none exists.

Yet, most records should be open to public inspection during regular business hours. This is the law.

The Daily News’ Sunshine Week project has shown some strengths and weaknesses in local governments’ public-records procedures.

We hope these strengths will be celebrated, and those weaknesses addressed.

And we wonder how much difficulty an ordinary citizen, not connected with the media, would have getting access to some public records.

If you have trouble achieving access, we’d like to hear about it. After all, it’s your government – and your right to know.